Private equity (PE) typically refers to investment funds, generally organized as limited partnerships, that buy and restructure companies. More formally, private equity is a type of equity and one of the asset classes consisting of equity securities and debt in operating companies that are not publicly traded on a stock exchange.
A mutual fund is a professionally managed investment fund that pools money from many investors to purchase securities. The term is typically used in the United States, Canada, and India, while similar structures across the globe include the SICAV in Europe and open-ended investment company (OEIC) in the UK.
An individual retirement account (IRA) in the United States is a form of "individual retirement plan", provided by many financial institutions, that provides tax advantages for retirement savings. It is a trust that holds investment assets purchased with a taxpayer's earned income for the taxpayer's eventual benefit in old age. An individual retirement account is a type of individual retirement arrangement as described in IRS Publication 590, Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs). Other arrangements include employer-established benefit trusts and individual retirement annuities, by which a taxpayer purchases an annuity contract or an endowment contract from a life insurance company.
A real estate investment trust (REIT) is a company that owns, and in most cases operates, income-producing real estate. REITs own many types of commercial real estate, ranging from office and apartment buildings to warehouses, hospitals, shopping centers, hotels and commercial forests. Some REITs engage in financing real estate.
A capital gains tax (CGT) is a tax on the profit realized on the sale of a non-inventory asset. The most common capital gains are realized from the sale of stocks, bonds, precious metals, real estate, and property.
An investment trust is a form of investment fund found mostly in the United Kingdom and Japan. Investment trusts are constituted as public limited companies and are therefore closed ended since the fund managers cannot redeem or create shares.
A mortgage-backed security (MBS) is a type of asset-backed security which is secured by a mortgage or collection of mortgages. The mortgages are aggregated and sold to a group of individuals that securitizes, or packages, the loans together into a security that investors can buy. Bonds securitizing mortgages are usually treated as a separate class, termed residential; another class is commercial, depending on whether the underlying asset is mortgages owned by borrowers or assets for commercial purposes ranging from office space to multi-dwelling buildings.
An income trust is an investment that may hold equities, debt instruments, royalty interests or real properties. They are especially useful for financial requirements of institutional investors such as pension funds, and for investors such as retired individuals seeking yield. The main attraction of income trusts is their stated goal of paying out consistent cash flows for investors, which is especially attractive when cash yields on bonds are low. Many investors are attracted by the fact that income trusts are not allowed to make forays into unrelated businesses: if a trust is in the oil and gas business it cannot buy casinos or motion picture studios.
An investment club is a group of individuals who meet for the purpose of pooling money and investing; members typically meet on a periodic basis to make investment decisions as a group through a voting process and recording of minutes, or gather information and perform investment transactions outside the group. In the US the upper limit for the value of an investment club's worth is $25m. There is no lower limit. Investment clubs provide members a means to learn about markets, while meeting and working with people who have similar interests.
An offshore fund is generally a collective investment scheme domiciled in an offshore jurisdiction. Like the term "offshore company", the term is more descriptive than definitive, and both the words 'offshore' and 'fund' may be construed differently.
A real estate mortgage investment conduit (REMIC) is "an entity that holds a fixed pool of mortgages and issues multiple classes of interests in itself to investors" under U.S. Federal income tax law and is "treated like a partnership for Federal income tax purposes with its income passed through to its interest holders". REMICs are used for the pooling of mortgage loans and issuance of mortgage-backed securities and have been a key contributor to the success of the mortgage-backed securities market over the past several decades.
In the United States, an annuity is a structured (insurance) product that each state approves and regulates. It is designed using a mortality table and mainly guaranteed by a life insurer. There are many different varieties of annuities sold by carriers. In a typical scenario, an investor will make a single cash premium to own an annuity. After the policy is issued the owner may elect to annuitize the contract for a chosen period of time. This process is called annuitization and can also provide a predictable, guaranteed stream of future income during retirement until the death of the annuitant. Alternatively, an investor can defer annuitizing their contract to get larger payments later, hedge long-term care cost increases, or maximize a lump sum death benefit for a named beneficiary.
In the United States, a master limited partnership (MLP) or publicly traded partnership (PTP) is a publicly traded entity taxed as a partnership. It combines the tax benefits of a partnership with the liquidity of publicly traded securities.
Real estate investing involves the purchase, ownership, management, rental and/or sale of real estate for profit. Improvement of realty property as part of a real estate investment strategy is generally considered to be a sub-specialty of real estate investing called real estate development. Real estate is an asset form with limited liquidity relative to other investments. It is also capital intensive and is highly cash flow dependent. If these factors are not well understood and managed by the investor, real estate becomes a risky investment.
Requires updating to reflect the current Income Tax Act and the growth of MICs that trade on the TSX.
A self-directed individual retirement account is an individual retirement account (IRA), provided by some financial institutions in the United States, which allows alternative investments for retirement savings. Some examples of these alternative investments are: real estate, private mortgages, private company stock, oil and gas limited partnerships, precious metals, digital assets, horses and livestock, and intellectual property. The complexity of the rules for self-directed IRA's prompted the SEC to issue a public notice in 2011 against an increased risk of fraud.
Private equity real estate is a term used in investment finance to refer to a specific subset of the real estate investment asset class. Private equity real estate refers to one of the four quadrants of the real estate capital markets, which include private equity, private debt, public equity and public debt.
A Business Development Company ("BDC") is a form of unregistered closed-end investment company in the United States that invests in small and mid-sized businesses. This form of company was created by Congress in 1980 as amendments to the Investment Company Act of 1940. Publicly filing firms may elect regulation as BDCs if they meet certain requirements of the Investment Company Act.
SteelPath was an investment advisory firm based in Dallas, Texas that specialized exclusively in master limited partnerships ("MLPs"). The company was registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment advisor. In 2010, the company received press attention by becoming the first investment advisor to offer open-ended MLP mutual funds. In July 2012, OppenheimerFunds, now Invesco, acquired SteelPath for its MLP business.
An investment fund is a way of investing money alongside other investors in order to benefit from the inherent advantages of working as part of a group such as reducing the risks of the investment by a significant percentage. These advantages include an ability to:
