Hypo Venture Capital is an independent investment advisory firm which focuses on global equities and options markets.
Here we look to dispel some of the jargon and confusion surrounding ‘Funds’, breaking them down, with no nonsense explanations in an attempt to help you understand this strategic investment.
Starting out?
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Many newcomers to equity investment are nervous about investing in individual firms – and with good reason. Putting all your money into a few stocks is a high-risk strategy, especially for the inexperienced, because it leaves you vulnerable to sharp fluctuations in the share price of the individual stocks you pick, not the markets in which they trade. If you get it right and pick winners, great. But if you pick a couple of big losers, your whole portfolio will be scuppered. Collective or ‘pooled’ investments can diversify your holdings and therefore reduce that risk.
Why pooled funds?
Unit trusts, open-ended investment companies (Oeics, pronounced ‘oiks’) and investment trusts are all vehicles that let you pool your money with lots of other ‘retail’ – or small – investors. (In the US, this kind of investment is known as a ‘mutual fund’.) The pooled money is then invested on your behalf in a wide range of different equities by specialist fund managers. (There are also funds that invest in bonds or other assets, such as commercial property or commodities.) The fund manager takes a fee to run the fund and research what stocks to buy.
If they get it right, it means you get access to a highly diversified range of stocks at a reasonable cost. It also gives you easy access to asset classes and international markets that would otherwise be difficult and/or expensive to invest in. For example, specialist funds are available that invest only in Japan, or Latin America, or only in technology firms, and so on. Also, different funds are designed to meet different investment objectives and there’s a wide range to choose from. Some aim for income, some for capital growth, and some for a balance of the two.
Unit trusts and Oeics
Until recently, unit trusts were the main kind of collective retail investment in the UK. With a unit trust, you buy a fixed number of units in a fund, which then rise and fall according to the value of the underlying assets the trust invests in. Over the past few years, many fund managers have converted their unit trusts into Oeics in the belief that investors find them simpler to understand. From the point of view of the investor, Oeics are more or less the same as unit trusts; they are ‘open-ended’ in the sense that (like unit trusts) the fund’s size expands and contracts depending on investor demand. The big difference is that Oeics have only one price (as opposed to the dual bid/offer pricing of unit trusts).
Investment trusts
Like Oeics, investment trusts are firms whose business is to invest in the shares of other companies. But unlike unit trusts and Oeics, investment trusts are ‘closed-ended’: there are a fixed number of shares in issue, which are traded on the stock exchange. The purpose of an investment trust is, broadly speaking, the same as an Oeic – to give smaller investors cheap access to a wide range of shares. But they are structured rather differently.
The fact that investment trust shares are traded on the open market (the London Stock Exchange) means the share price is determined not just by the value of the trust’s underlying assets, but by current market demand for its shares. Sometimes, if an investment trust is popular, it will trade at a premium to its net asset value (NAV). Other times, it will be trading at a discount.
The fact that investment trust shares are traded on the open market (the London Stock Exchange) means the share price is determined not just by the value of the trust’s underlying assets, but by current market demand for its shares. Sometimes, if an investment trust is popular, it will trade at a premium to its net asset value (NAV). Other times, it will be trading at a discount.
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