Access EIS Thoughts?

[bernie]

What do people think of the Access EIS fund?

https://www.syndicateroom.com/invest

If I wanted to research it, what should I consider?

Thanks

[UncleEbenezer]

Interesting - thanks for posting. If you DYOR, an executive summary here would be welcome!

Off the top of my head, ...

Is there a track record? If it's something like a tracker of syndicateroom's investees over a period (what period?), you might be able to dig up something. Or is it weighted towards less-popular investments 'cos the most popular ones are already oversubscribed? Or??

What are the total fees? i.e. those paid by investee companies, as well as the advertised fees paid by investors? And is that 10% performance fee per investment (which would look very high) or per portfolio (still high, but some are worse)?

How much control do you have over what tax year your eligible investments fall into?

[bernie]

Thanks for the suggestions.

There is some reading material here: https://files.syndicateroom.com/fund-do ... -feb20.pdf

From page 5: "It is important to note that full investment will not occur in the current tax year and full tax relief
may not be achieved until the following tax year. Syndicate Room estimates that all tax certificates
will be available within 15 months of the initial investment to the fund, but this is not guaranteed
and there may be delays that Syndicate Room has no control over. "

Page 6 shows past performance of their similar funds, which is totally inconclusive.

I'm wondering if Edward Hume-Kendall is related to Simon Hume-Kendall. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... years.html

There is more reading material here: https://files.syndicateroom.com/fund-do ... 180320.pdf

It mentions simulated past performance, though that figure is just from their cherry picked angels, so I would not trust it. Their past performance figures of the market are probably fine.

[TomSR]

Hi There,

This is Tom from SyndicateRoom. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about the fund here in this thread so that it's all in the public.

A few general points regarding track record, EIS and fees:

1. We spent a huge amount of time (nearly two years) indexing the startup market and identifying the trends. The main result of it was that there were angel investors who beat the market and hit, at a minimum, 28% IRR over at least the last five years. While we identified ~150 of these angels, we partnered with around 50 to co-invest with for our Access fund. I'm not allowed to post links yet but if you search for "Super Angels SyndicateRoom" you'll likely find a page which discusses them more.

2. For qualifying investors, EIS is great and offers the ability to carry back one tax year. Therefore, should some of your underlying investments be made in "the next" tax year, you would be able to carry those back to the current tax year and, in theory, claim all of them against a single tax year. Note, I'm not a tax advisor so this is not advice.

3. Access has some of the lowest fees for EIS funds when you take them all into consideration. We only take out our initial admin fee and 3 (of 7) years of annual management fees from investors initial investments. This is important as EIS relief only applies on the funds that ultimately are invested, not the amount you invest into a fund.

Additionally, our performance fee, called "carry", is only 10% which is half of what most funds charge.

If you'd like to read the underlying data that powers our fund, our whitepaper can be found by adding /invest/whitepaper to the end of our main url.

Apologies that it requires you to be logged in to read it.

Tom