New Kids on the Block
November 27, 2017 | Matt Osbourne | ThinkAdvisor
When someone starts tracking a new investment vehicle, it’s usually because the category is catching on and no else is tracking it. That’s what spurred Jacob Mohs to create the Interval Fund Tracker this year. The Interval Fund space is still relatively small, with only $17 billion in assets under management as of the third quarter of 2017, but Jacob was intrigued. “It’s an interesting space that’s accelerating, and I saw a gap that other data providers were not filling,” Jacob told my colleague.
Don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of an interval fund or its “sibling,” the tender-offer fund. They both belong to the family of so-called unlisted closed-end funds, and while they’ve been around since 1993, unlisted closed-end funds have not made much of a splash until recently.
Their growing popularity can be traced to the never-ending search for higher and uncorrelated returns. But it can also be tied to tapping the so-called “mass affluent” retail market and arguably, to academic work by the behavioral economist and recent Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler who argues that we aren’t rational consumers, after all.
