The first Exchange Traded Instrument (ETI) from the Liechtenstein-based iMaps ETI plc launched on January 13 on the Vienna Stock Exchange.

Asset manager and BaFin licensed PP Asset Management, which runs the Haack investment strategy, launched the Haack Performance ETI on Monday. Hans-Jürgen Haack, Senior Manager at PP Asset Management, masterminded the strategy. It has delivered a return of 20% over the past year.

The strategy has been made available to retail investors on the Vienna stock exchange as an Actively Managed Certificate (AMC) or Exchange Traded Instrument (ETI).

The iMaps Capital Markets Group arranged the ETI.  Its wholly-owned subsidiary, iMaps ETI AG, issued the ETI.

The everyday investor can buy a piece of a proven strategy – just phone the broker!

Said Hans-Jürgen Haack in a statement: “I am pleased that we start trading with our Actively Managed Certificate (AMC) on the Vienna Stock Exchange. This means that investors who do not want to follow the investment recommendations themselves all the time now also have easy access via stock exchange trading via their own broker to invest in our benchmark-independent product.”

How the ETI offers the best of many worlds

Günter Woinar, CEO of iMaps Capital Markets European operations, explains that Exchange Listed Instruments, or ETIs for short, issued by the Liechtenstein iMaps ETI AG combine the best of many worlds:

• It’s a public offering like a UCITS fund,
• It’s exchange-traded similar to an ETF,
• Flexible like an alternative investment fund, and
• Lastly, based on collateralization to Intertrust as a trustee in favor of ETI investors. This avoids the credit risk of the issuer.

“The demand shows us that we have met the needs of many asset managers with this financial innovation,” said Woinar.

How individual asset managers can use an ETI/AMC

Moreover, the AMC vehicle overcomes a lot of limitations for the asset manager starting on his own:

• handling individual client accounts is not scalable and might become inefficient with an increasing number of clients
• several investments like Hedge Funds, Real Estate Funds and Private Equity Funds have a high minimum investment amount or restrict themselves only to institutional investors
• many asset managers, therefore, like to choose to launch their own investment vehicle.
• Anyhow the well-known and widespread fund structures are in many cases neither accessible nor suitable due to various limitations,
  • several months of launch time,
  • high set up & running costs,
  • poor flexibility,
  • marketing restrictions, and
  • regulatory restrictions.
  • for investment vehicles with less than 10 mio Euro AuM a fund structure is not suitable

Further, advantages of iMaps ETI/AMC to new asset managers:

• The asset manager gets a flexible solution for his tailor-made portfolio investment strategy
• It could include not only stocks and bonds but in addition, any asset classes like structured products, mutual funds, any alternative investment funds, options, futures, FOREX and even cryptocurrencies.
• The asset manager and his traders get Direct Market Access and thus can trade 24 hours fully electronically.
• The iMaps AMC platform can cover even more complex quant strategies using API direct links.
• An independent trustee holds a pledge on the hedge assets for the benefit of the investors. Thus adequate collateral backs all the AMCs issued on iMap platform. Investors enjoy protection from credit risk at no additional cost.
• The time to market is only 2-4 weeks. The Actively Managed Certificates are registered and approved for public offering in Germany, Austria, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland and United Kingdom for a minimum investment of 1000 Euro.

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