For more than a quarter of a century, David Webb was the Hong Kong stock market’s self-appointed unpaid watchdog. An often solitary figure, through forensic analysis of financial information, he regularly exposed the territory’s darker side, helped by his seat on the board of the Hong Kong Exchange (HKEx). As he said: “It’s better to rock the boat from within than swimming around outside.”
“David’s enduring contribution was that of speaking truth to power in a manner so well founded in research and impeccable logic that the powerful had few, if any, convincing answers,” said Ashley Alder, the former chief executive of Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission. “He was virtually alone in shining a light on collusion, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing in the murkier areas of business life.”
Webb regularly highlighted how big shareholders manipulated the market and infringed on private investors’ rights. He also campaigned against cartels in electricity prices, petrol stations, supermarkets and cement production. Above all, he prized greater transparency to deter the shady deals he regularly encountered.
As the Beijing government gradually tightened its control over the former colony, his allies in exposing the authorities’ shortcomings melted away until he became virtually isolated. He attacked the National Security Law imposed by Beijing in 2020, which made it illegal to call for Hong Kong’s independence from China, or do anything that undermined the central government’s authority. He feared it would lead to “peak authoritarianism” and the erosion of what he had fought for. He noted in 2021 the “chilling effect” of the law, as previously outspoken figures fell silent.
Webb was a former London investment banker who retired at 32 to become a full-time activist. He usually believed he was the smartest person in any room, often with justification. Despite his acerbic reputation, friends described him as caring and gentle. He argued that it was almost selfish not to use his financial security and expertise to “give back to the community”.
Through his austere, text-heavy platform, webb-site.com, the stocky, dark-haired Webb dismantled Hong Kong tycoons’ opaque networks and forced regulators to rethink. His most satisfying coup was the 2017 exposure of the Enigma Network, a web of 50 listed companies locked in complex cross-shareholdings designed to take decisions away from outside investors. His report, The Enigma Network: 50 Stocks Not to Own, wiped $6 billion off the market value of the firms named and led to the largest investigation in the history of Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption. But the establishment closed ranks: of the six directors arrested, only two were jailed.
By 1998, Webb’s profits from personal investing had made him wealthy enough “to be fairly certain I wouldn’t need to work again, so I could offend whoever I liked in Hong Kong”. He maintained the investment habit for the rest of his life.
One of his first campaigns in 1998, the year after Britain returned the former colony to China, was to urge the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) to prosecute the Hong Kong government for breaching its takeover and mergers code through stock market interventions. The government claimed exemption, but battle lines were drawn.
He next turned his attention to Cyberport, a high-tech project awarded to Richard Li, son of the tycoon Li Ka-shing, in dubious circumstances. Webb criticised the project as a “cosy deal” among the elites. He took on the family in 2009 when Li attempted to take his telecommunications company, PCCW, private. Webb detected suspicious share registrations, as thousands of the board’s shares were split among employees to manipulate the shareholder vote. After his relentless blogging and complaints to the regulator, the Court of Appeal blocked the $2.2 billion scheme. “The dominance of several tycoons over generations has impeded economic development here because of their anti-competitive practices and rent-seeking behaviour,” he said.
Webb had a complex relationship with the establishment. He was twice elected as an independent non-executive director of the HKEx, thanks to rank-and-file investors’ votes trumping opposition from the board’s government-nominated majority. But he resigned in 2008, claiming he could no longer effect change from the inside. He said: “I believe in the long run that China and Hong Kong will be less autocratic, more democratic, and will move away from the authoritarian system because there’s no way to maintain economic growth by central planning. It’s much better to let the free markets work.” He was a vocal advocate of civil liberties, arguing that economic freedom could not survive without political freedom.
“Holding people to account is good for the economy and for the people,” he said. “If things would have been worse without the effort, that’s also a win.”
David Michael Webb was born in London in 1965 and adopted in infancy by Michael Webb, an economics lecturer, and his wife Veronica, a dispensing optician, who had a daughter and another son. He spent his early years in Leicester before the family moved to Bangkok, where his father worked for the United Nations advising public utilities. There, Webb attended an international school run by American nuns, an experience he later reckoned “probably helped inform my atheism”.
He returned to the UK, joining Fulford School in York, where he joined a jazz band and, aged 14, encountered a second-hand teletype terminal donated by the parent-teacher association. This ignited a lifelong passion for computing and mathematics, and the school arranged for him to use the University of York’s mainframe. In his teens, he wrote several books and games for the then-popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Amstrad computers. They included Supercharge Your Spectrum (1983) and Advanced Spectrum Machine Language (1984), technical manuals that helped unlock the machine’s potential.
In his foreword to Supercharge Your Spectrum, Webb thanked his parents for “seventeen years of unbelievable tolerance” and his teachers for “ignoring the slight absence of homework on the five A-levels and two S-levels for which I was studying while writing this book”. His video games included Starion, a 3D space simulator, and Spookyman, a Pac-Man-style maze game. His publisher, Alfred Milgrom, noted Webb’s “very unusual willingness” to share his knowledge, a trait that re-emerged in his Hong Kong campaigns.
Webb read mathematics at Exeter College, Oxford, graduating in 1986. He used the book royalties to fund early stock market investing, reading the Financial Times in the college junior common room before cycling to the local Barclays branch to place orders.
He worked for three London investment banks, eventually joining Barclays de Zoete Wedd (BZW). In 1991, it sent him to Hong Kong on an intended two-year secondment, but he fell in love with the territory and stayed for the rest of his life. After leaving BZW, he worked for a joint venture between NatWest and Wheelock, a local property group.
He quit the corporate world when he became frustrated by newspapers passing off his well-argued polemics as their own. Instead, he started his own website and wrote under his own name. He managed his own portfolio, focusing on undervalued small companies, and claimed to have outperformed the main Hang Seng share index by an average of 12 percentage points a year between 1995 and 2018. His annual Christmas pick became a celebrated market event, often sending the price of his selection soaring in anticipation of buying from his growing following.
“I look at the 600 companies that make up 10 per cent of the market value in Hong Kong,” he said, “not the 100 companies that make up the other 90 per cent. I look for good-quality management, by which I mean no history of abusing shareholders, with a long history, meaning that if they tried to rip off shareholders, they would have done so by now.”
He was chairman of the local branch of Mensa and a member of the exclusive Hong Kong Club, where he occasionally stirred trouble even among the club’s normally immovable committees.
Last year, knowing he did not have long to live, Webb made arrangements to archive his work. He attempted to donate his database to the University of Hong Kong, but the proposal was rejected by the university’s senior management, a decision Webb attributed to the “post-National Security Law environment”. Consequently, he shut down webb-site.com and bequeathed the data and code to the public domain via GitHub, describing it as his “final gift to the public interest”. No one was willing to continue his campaigning against the authorities. He endowed a tutorial fellowship in computer science at Exeter College and established a prize there for academic excellence.
He was appointed MBE in 2025 “for services to raising standards of corporate economic governance, particularly in Hong Kong”, a British government gesture that would not have been greeted with full-throated enthusiasm in Beijing.
On turning 60 last August, he posted a photo of himself taking a “joy ride” on public transport for HK$2 (about 19p), a concession for the elderly. He criticised the subsidy as “fiscal madness” and “economically irrational”, but said he was taking advantage of it because it would be a mistake not to.
He is survived by his wife, Karen, a management consultant whom he met in Hong Kong, and their two sons.
In his final post, Webb wrote: “After my loving family, running webb-site.com and campaigning for the public interest in corporate and economic governance since 1998 has been the joy of my life, far exceeding the satisfaction of just beating the market with my investments.”
David Webb MBE, banker, investor and corporate campaigner, was born on August 29, 1965. He died of metastatic prostate cancer on January 13, 2026, aged 60
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