Hello. I am following up on my June 28 and August 13 posts. I received a number of responses and PMs, asking the same questions that have been asked many times here. How did I invest in IMGA? Can I recommend a lawyer? I don’t have time to respond individually. Here’s how I did it, and information about hiring a lawyer.
To get started, I sent an email to Nuno da Rocha Correia at Bison Bank. ncorreia_at_bisonbank_dot_com.
If you are not in Portugal, as far as I can tell, you need a lawyer to open a bank account at Bison Bank or any other bank. I asked Nuno for recommendations for a lawyer. If you don’t have a lawyer, you might consider using one that Nuno recommends. Please don’t send me a PM asking me for a recommendation for a lawyer. I just told you how to find one. Nuno recommended several lawyers to me.
Opening the bank account involves a fair amount of paperwork and time. It is not hard. It just requires paperwork and time. I repeat. It is not hard, but it requires paperwork and time. When I was done, I had, among other things, online access to my Bison Bank account. Nice.
After the account was open at Bison Bank, I transferred money to it from a US bank account. It was not hard, but it required more paperwork and time. I repeatedly transferred too little money (because I was trying to cut it too close to 350K euro), and had to send more. My own fault. I tried to be patient and kind and appreciative to all involved. I suggest you do the same.
After my funds had arrived, I sent Nuno instructions to invest my funds in IMGA. He sent me a form. It’s pretty easy to fill out. It has one set of boxes that are way too small, as I recall. When I did something wrong, he told me, and I filled it out again. The IMGA form is simpler than the forms that closed-end PE funds sent to me.
Nuno invested my funds, but it took a few days to see the funds in my account online, partly as I recall because it takes time for the confirmation to hit and partly because I did not know where to look. My own fault.
There are fees and taxes. The biggest fee is not paid to Bison Bank or to IMGA. It is paid to your lawyer.
The next biggest is paid to whoever you use to transfer money. (I used Transferwise.) I did pay a 35 euro custody fee to Bison Bank, which I think is a one-time fee, or maybe it’s annual. I don’t know. I think I am paying about 9 euro a month in monthly fees and taxes. I paid a 245 euro statement fee to Bison Bank, which I believe was for the statement that Bison Bank issued to the SEF confirming that I had invested in the IMGA fund.
I paid ZERO subscription fees to IMGA to invest in IMGA. Plus, when I last read the prospectus, there are ZERO redemption fees if I want to take my money out of IMGA. In other words, I can change my mind at any time and get all my money back at any time. That’s very cool. You cannot do that with a closed-end PE fund.
I invested 351K euro in early June. The market value of my investment is now 372K euro. I made 21K euro on paper in about 90 days. How do I know that? Because the market value of a share of IMGA Class R is published daily on Investing.com. I believe it is also published on the Financial Times website. Will that rate of return continue? Unlikely. Do I consider IMGA a better investment than a US index fund? No.
My lawyers submitted my application and my wife’s application to SEF in June and July, respectively. My wife and I were pre-approved by SEF in August.
IMGA appears to me to be a transparent investment, and a liquid investment. It involved little initial or ongoing effort by me, compared to what I faced if I wanted to buy real estate. I can check the value daily online. I can redeem any time I want. For me, it makes pretty good sense.