May 2019

The New ARP+ Service

As you may or may not be aware, new and stricter rules (known as MiFID II) do not allow financial services firms to provide research free of charge any longer, and the new rules are limiting my ability to write about specific investment opportunities without charging a fee for it.

Consequently, we have decided to change our business model a little bit. The Absolute Return Letter, which has always been made available to the public at no cost, will continue to be freely available but, as it is subject to the MiFID II rules, specific investment opportunities will never be discussed in those letters. That would turn the Absolute Return Letter into research under the MiFID rules, and we would have to charge a fee.

For those of you keen to know more about how our thinking is translated into explicit investment opportunities, we will soon be rolling out an add-on service (which we call ARP+), for which we will charge £300 annually. By doing it this way, we can share our investment thinking and still comply with the MiFID rules.

For £300 per annum you will receive the following:

1. At least 6 Absolute Return Observations every year. These papers, which we have produced since 2015, dig deeper on specific invest opportunities which we, under the MiFID II rules, have to charge for.

2. Access to all previous Absolute Return Observations on request (of which there are about 40). All subscribers to the new ARP+ service will receive a list of what is in the archives, from which you can pick and choose.

3. Quarterly webinars with Niels, where he will review relevant investment topics.

Clients of the ARP+ service will have access to a wealth of information that is not available to subscribers of the Absolute Return Letter, and we believe you will find that quite exciting.

If you are a long-term reader of the Absolute Return Letter, you will know that eight megatrends, which we have identified over the years, drive pretty much everything we do at Absolute Return Partners. The eight megatrends are as follows:

1. The End of the Debt Supercycle

2. Retirement of the Baby Boomers

3. Declining Spending Powers of the Middle Classes

4. Rise of the East

5. The Age of Disruption

6. Running out of Freshwater

7. Electrification of Everything

8. Mean Reversion of Wealth-to-GDP

Those eight megatrends form the landscape around our research work, our investment strategy and our portfolio construction. For that reason, those eight megatrends also dominate the content of the Absolute Return Observations that you may be about to subscribe to.

And the good news doesn’t end there. We are in advanced discussions to launch a small family of megatrend funds. For regulatory reasons, I cannot provide any details yet, but stay tuned. The first megatrend fund will likely be launched in the autumn.

We obviously don’t know how our readers will respond to this new concept; hence we have decided not to settle on any particular e-commerce platform until we have had some feedback. For that reason, today’s letter contains no instructions as to how to pay, should you decide to subscribe. However, should you in principle decide to subscribe, please send a brief email to info@arpinvestments.com, confirming your interest. That will help us a great deal in terms of e-commerce platform choice.

Setting up a new service like this takes time. We were hoping to launch it on the 1st July, but we need to establish an e-commerce platform, and then summer is upon us. For that reason, we have decided to postpone the launch date to the 1st September.

In order to get everything going, we intend to offer the first year’s subscription at half price - i.e. £150 - to already existing readers. The only two conditions are that you already subscribe to the Absolute Return Letter, and that you commit yourself to the new service before the 1st September.

In addition to that, the first 100 subscribers to the new service will also receive a free copy of Niels’ acclaimed book The End of Indexing, which was published last year.

One final note: Existing investment management clients of Absolute Return Partners will automatically be rolled in to the new ARP+ service at no cost. You do not need to do anything.

The Team at Absolute Return Partners

31 May 2019