Our Team - Marble Rock Asset Management

Jakes Jacobs

Jakes is a seasoned professional in the South African Money and Capital Markets with four decades of experience in sectors including life offices, investment- and merchant banking, discount houses, brokerage firms and investment managers.

Jakes started out in the legal fraternity but then established himself within the financial markets following tenures at, amongst others, Volkskas Merchant Bank, Lifegro, the Picbel Group, Discount Merchant Bank and De Witt, Morgan & Co. Jakes has always had a particular focus on the Money and Capital Markets, especially financial derivatives and the development of financial market instruments, trading, the oversight of administrative procedures and risk monitoring.

Marius van Wyk

Marius started his career as a research and development engineer in 2001, at Omnipless Antenna Systems in Cape Town, South Africa. He was responsible for key components in the company’s international satellite communications solutions, which are still being used by major international airline and aircraft brands across the world.

In 2008 Marius left development engineering to take up a career in investment management. He joined a boutique asset management firm steadily progressing from analyst to portfolio manager, overseeing two long only funds during his tenure.

Prior to joining Marble Rock Marius co-founded Empiric Capital in 2014. Empiric Capital deployed a scientific investment process with operations in the UK and South Africa. Marius was responsible for leading the research and development team and overseeing the Cayman (global equities) and SA market neutral funds.

Rick Walker

Rick embarked on his career in economics as a research assistant at the University of Stellenbosch and furthered his education at the University of North Carolina in the United States. In 2010, Rick joined Oxford Economics (formerly NKC Independent Economics) as an economist evaluating the sovereign risk of various countries. His passion for financial analysis led him to become a fixed income analyst, where he assessed investable opportunities within the African fixed income market.

In 2012, Rick transitioned to a hedge fund, Fairtree Capital, where he focused on researching trade ideas. His responsibilities extended to designing derivative pricing models and opportunity monitors for the global fixed income and commodity markets. Additionally, he developed models to determine the relative value of currency pairs, drawing upon some of the core principles of his master’s thesis and PhD dissertation. In 2014, Rick joined Flip founding Marble Rock Asset Management. Currently, Rick serves as the co-portfolio manager of Marble Rock’s MoonRock Global Opportunities Hedge Fund and the KeyStone Retail Hedge Fund.

Barry Ross

Barry is a fixed income specialist with more than two decades’ experience in the fixed income markets, including a diverse range of portfolios, including long only, money market, liability matching and hedge portfolios in both a local and global environment.

Prior to joining Marble Rock, Barry assumed responsibility for fixed income research and trade idea generation for the institutional client base of Nedbank Capital. Barry also used to be the fixed income portfolio manager for the Protiya Fund, a multi-strategy hedge fund division of the Peregrine Group and from 2008 to mid-2012, he was a senior trader and co-head of a proprietary hedge fund business within Nedbank Capital. Ross has also worked for PSG Absolute Investments as a co-manager for the fixed income hedge fund product, as well as for PIMCO in Sydney, Australia as a member of the portfolio management team on their global fixed income desk.

Flip du Plessis

Flip’s career in fund management started at the Decillion Proprietary Desk in 1998 where he was exposed to capital and currency markets. From there he went on to join Blue Alpha in 2006 where he got the opportunity to manage a portion of the capital of a multi strategy hedge fund. During the time at Blue Alpha Flip established a Fixed Income and Soft Commodity team managing two hedge funds of the two underlying asset classes.

Flip joined Fairtree in 2010 as co-manager of the Fairtree Fixed Income Fund and the Fairtree African Blackwood Commodity Fund. Flip subsequently established Marble Rock Asset Management in 2014 and is currently the lead portfolio manager on the MoonRock Global Opportunities Fund and co-manager on the KeyStone and RockSolid Fixed Income Funds.