ETPs are a flexible alternative for market participants
For every investor, it is essential to have a working knowledge of investment vehicles as a basis for decision-making. For any financial advisor, the key is for their clients to have an understanding of the portfolio and easy access to invest in it.
Mary Lyons, financial advisor and founder of Benchmark Income Group, told Business Insider, “in an ideal world, a financial advisor would look at your overall financial picture and help you create a plan to get to and through retirement.”
An investment vehicle can be understood as how a person can invest their money. The distribution challenges are often significant for those who offer a specialized investment portfolio.
In this context, securitization, can be an alternative to evaluate. Asset securitization is a mechanism that converts illiquid or liquid assets into an exchange-listed product (ETP) to be issued in the capital market to provide a return to investors.
Contrary to conventional thought, not only large companies are prone to asset securitization. Currently, a wide variety of portfolio managers distinguish themselves by their specialized investment strategies under this trend.
In these cases, managers offer access to investment portfolios through ETPs, providing several advantages to investors compared to traditional investment methods and direct investments. These include:
- Professional management: is essential when direct investments are difficult to find.
- Ease of access: to off-shore investors, who would otherwise be more challenging to reach.
- Diversification: investments made through securitization allow investors to participate in large-size assets, such as real estate developments. This advantage is vital for non-institutional investors who cannot afford high tickets.
Securitization of portfolios with ETPs
Since they were marketed for the first time in the last decade of the 20th century in the United States, ETPs have been an essential part of asset managers’ portfolios as they are flexible, transparent, and open to a universe of global investors.
The securitization of investment strategies has since marked a trend that has been of great help to financial advisors, as it provides them with various benefits when promoting and obtaining clients.
Flexibility
One of the main reasons for launching an investment strategy under this mechanism is the flexibility provided to managers.
An ETP brings together several advantages of stocks, can be traded in a regulated market, and their cost is similar to buying or selling securities. In addition, they do not require early redemption charges.
These characteristics facilitate the distribution of notes in the leading global financial markets and allow them to be more flexible than traditional funds since these lose dynamism by requiring more significant requirements and other regulatory burdens.
Customization of products
Within the large group of ETPs, there are several alternatives available to portfolio managers, depending on the investment strategy they plan to launch. Allowing them to structure products according to their needs, considering a large pool of financial assets or even investment portfolios, is something in which FlexFunds specializes.
The flexibility of underlying assets that the investment strategy can have includes specific sectors or particular assets such as a significant new real estate project, a novel alternative energy generation plant, or many others, which investors can access from their own brokerage account.
Cost savings
ETPs management can translate into lower maintenance costs, greater liquidity, transparency and, of course, transactional savings for portfolio managers and investors compared to other funds.
The British firm IG summarizes this quality by stating that an ETP combines “in a single transaction” what “would otherwise be several transactions in different individual assets”, which translates into lower expenses.
In addition, it may provide for tax benefits, in the case of some jurisdictions, as “capital gains only arise on the sale of the entire ETP and are therefore only taxed once and in aggregate.”
Distribution
Given its quality of being a highly versatile instrument, an ETP opens up a universe of opportunities for asset managers on a global scale, allowing them to connect with investors looking to diversify their portfolios with a solid model.
The key is to take advantage of this instrument’s exposure to “certain underlying markets that are not available through traditional trading vehicles, such as exotic stocks or indices”, IG notes in its report.
In the current landscape, the firms that make up the asset management industry are facing abrupt and rapid changes in which many of their traditional products, tools, and approaches must adapt quickly to maintain the effectiveness of pre-Pandemic times.
Nowadays, players like FlexFunds specialize in structuring ETPs by securitizing assets quickly and efficiently, serving portfolio managers of any asset class around the world.
FlexFunds is helping managers adapt to market changes through solutions that meet the need for cost control while providing investment structures launched in half the time of many existing alternatives.
Sources:
- https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/what-does-a-financial-advisor-do
- https://www.ig.com/es/estrategias-de-trading/-que-es-un-producto-negociado-en-bolsa–etp–0-190204
