Investment selection
On this website you'll find a broad selection of offers for experienced investors, including VCTs, EIS and SEIS offers, Inheritance Tax portfolios and AIM ISAs.
The ones we rate most highly are our ‘Featured Offers' – they’re marked with a small gold “W”. This is a shortlist of offers we would choose if we were to pick just a handful of investments of that type from what is available at the time, assessed using a quantitative and qualitative filtering process.
We do this to help you make your own considered investment decisions. It is not a personal recommendation to invest.
It is not possible to “buy” a place as a featured offer – we assess the investment on its investment merits alone.
If an investment stops being a featured offer, this won’t (in most cases) be because we no longer believe it is a good investment, it will just mean that if we had to pick a handful of options at that time, it wouldn’t be one of them.
How do we arrive at our shortlist?
For all of our investment opportunities, we use a mix of qualitative assessment and quantitative analysis to select our featured offers. We look at a range of categories depending on the investment opportunity, however these usually include manager, investment strategy, process, track record, risk profile, fees and client service.
We update the shortlists regularly. At least twice a year we speak to the manager or management team – in person, by phone or email.
Remember, all of these offers are considered high risk and you should not invest money you cannot afford to lose: capital is at risk. Tax rules can change, and benefits depends on circumstances.
Funds and portfolios
For VCTs and EIS funds, we place particular emphasis on managers’ experience, resources and appeal to investee companies, with the result that we tend to favour well-resourced venture capital teams with a defined investment strategy, supported by specialist expertise.
For SEIS, we like to see funds either acting as a destination for particular types of businesses, or offering investees wide ranging support that can appeal to a broad spectrum of founders.
For IHT portfolios, we favour managers which have historically shown that they are able to absorb and deploy large sums of capital at relatively short notice and that past estates have been approved for IHT relief. We also favour managers who are able to diversify portfolios.
Direct investments in EIS single companies
For EIS single company offers, we carry out a review, covering many strands, such as management, commercial and financial and distil our findings into an easy-to-read research report so you can make your own investment decisions. When selecting companies, we look for management teams that are passionate, determined and capable.