John Jacquemin T'73
 |
"I have a hard time saying no to an opportunity"
|
A Lifetime of Adventure
John Jacquemin sailed across the Atlantic last year in a 51-foot Swan, rotating four-hour shifts on deck with the crew of 10. He swam in five-mile-deep waters, played silly word games to pass the time, and endured squalls with 70-mile-per-hour winds. "I'm an adventurer and explorer of sorts—in more than an armchair sense but not in the pure sense," says Jacquemin, who has summited Mount Kilimanjaro and competes in triathlons.
The curiosity and patience that took him across the ocean has helped him steer his privately held company, Mooring Financial Corporation of Vienna, Va., into safe harbor. Anticipating the current economic downturn, Jacquemin started a new hedge fund, Mooring Intrepid Opportunity Fund, last year. Invested in credit derivatives, the fund is up 120 percent since inception in March 2007. Mooring Capital Fund, a nine-year-old distressed-debt fund, had a 15.4 percent return in 2007 and is having another record year. And return on equity in the Mooring Tax Asset Group, which buys tax liens, is anticipated to exceed 25 percent in 2008.
That puts Jacquemin's enterprises in an elite—and sought-after—group of thriving fund managers in a challenging financial market. "Only 35 percent of our equity comes from outside investors, and now would be the perfect opportunity to scale up significantly," he says. "But I'm 61. Do I really want to do that? I have a hard time saying no to an opportunity, but on the other hand, I don't need it."
Or perhaps it's the explorer and the financier in him arguing. Both were evident at age 10, when he raised money by writing geological newsletters he then sold to kind-hearted neighbors. At Penn State, he "took a smattering of almost everything" and regretfully realized that oceanography was not a lucrative undertaking. When three years as a stockbroker showed him he wasn't a salesman, he went to Tuck. "It was so challenging, demanding, and concentrated that it fostered not only knowledge but a high level of self-confidence," he says.
Jacquemin spent nine years as a consultant and CFO before discovering his entrepreneurial niche in 1982: middle-market commercial equipment leasing. Building a core strength in credit and asset evaluation, he carefully sought out risk/reward ratios that others didn't see, waiting patiently rather than buying overpriced assets, and retaining liquidity so as to maneuver through money-tight times. During the U.S. savings and loan crisis, Jacquemin switched to buying and managing commercial loans and other assets from failed banks. In 1997, he began buying real estate tax liens. Mooring Tax Asset Group is now the second largest firm of its kind in the nation.
Jacquemin is "disengaging" somewhat from his 45-employee firm: he works four days a week, takes 12 weeks of vacation, and spends time on The Jacquemin Family Foundation, which sponsors arts and early-education programs for needy children. As junior advisors, his three daughters—ages 10, 16, and 17—each decide annually where to donate $1,000; lately, it's to MS research and horse rescue operations. Following a family trip to Africa, his wife, Tracie, committed the foundation to providing scholarship funds for young nomadic Kenyans to attend high school.
Jacquemin, a Tuck overseer and board member for the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, is planning to scuba-dive among pristine coral reefs soon with a National Geographic research expedition he is helping fund. "Hopefully I can be of help—or at least not get in the way," he says. "The older I get, the more I realize I don't know—but the more fascinated I am by how much I learn."
|
