Independent investment consulting business Evergreen Consultants has launched a new ratings and research house that will focus on closed-ended, wholesale and complex investments aimed at sophisticated investors and their financial advisers.
The new business, Evergreen Ratings, will be a subsidiary of Evergreen Consultants and led by director Angela Ashton, with Daniel Liptak and Mark Wist joining as research consultants in the alternative investments and property sectors, respectively.
Ashton said the new ratings house would examine closed-ended, wholesale, illiquid and listed investment vehicles offered by Australian and global fund managers to investors in Australia and its research would cover property syndicates, private equity, venture capital and hedge funds.
The creation of the new business was driven by regular requests, from financial advisers or fund managers issuing products, for Evergreen Consultants to review those types of investment vehicles, which Ashton said fell outside its scope of work, which focused on managed accounts and liquid investments.
“We are strongly of the view that there is a place for these products across investment portfolios and we think it is important to offer a ‘whole-of-portfolio’ service. We believe there is a clear gap in the market in rating these types of investment vehicles at the very time the supply of and demand for them is growing significantly among financial planners and their clients,” she said.
“They are often far more complex than many ‘standard’ managed funds, therefore requiring significant resources and skill sets to assess them properly. We believe this is one of the key reasons other ratings houses have not analysed these types of products consistently.”
She said Evergreen Ratings would charge fund managers a fee to have complex investments rated and the ratings reports would be made available to financial advisers. The first four reports, covering solar energy, hybrid exchange-traded funds, private credit and property syndicates, would be released later this month, she added.
“We look forward to expanding our scope of research and providing reports that cover the wider spectrum of investment products over the long term,” she said.
“Many of these vehicles offer opportunities that are difficult to get in a standard managed funds format, such as high levels of consistent yield. This becomes all the more relevant in today’s highly uncertain economic scenario.”
