By Brett Forrest
Bloomberg Businessweek
The Mongolian Stock Exchange occupies a single room inside a gray building that once housed a children’s movie theater, just off Sükhbaatar Square in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. On any given day, it’s quieter than the nearby National Library, as 20 or so traders in cubicles click away softly on their laptops. This muted bourse hardly seems a place to make a fortune, but James Passin, who needs no prompting to declare that he’s “super bullish on Mongolia,” swears it is. Passin, who’s just flown across 12 time zones from New York City, has as much reason to promote Mongolia’s potential as any foreign investor in the country. His future is riding on it.
Passin, 41, has at least $130 million in three funds that he oversees for his employer, Firebird Management, a Manhattan firm that specializes in emerging markets. Passin controls four companies listed on the Mongolian Stock Exchange — in coal, fluorite, and real estate — as well as an undisclosed number of private enterprises. His placements make Firebird one of Mongolia’s largest and most diversified foreign private equity funds.