We believe you should set aside a “rainy day fund” in cash to handle any unforeseen emergencies that might arise in your life and if you are fortunate enough, a discretionary fund to invest in opportunities in which you have high conviction like a particular stock or bond. The rest of your money should be invested for the long term in responsible, diversified strategies. We recommend starting with no more than one third (1/3) of the value of your investment portfolio in aggressive alternative investment funds that may outperform the overall markets, such as the ones offered by BambooBoss Growth Partners.
Frequently Asked Questions
General Questions
Your assets are held in tier 1 prime brokerage accounts that BambooBoss has created at fully vetted, large institutionally focused brokerage partners. BambooBoss may only provide trading instructions for these accounts. In the event that a brokerage partner goes bankrupt or no longer has sufficient funds to continue operating, your shares in real estate, cash balance and equities will remain intact and can be transferred by our independent fund administrator to another custodian or broker/dealer. Our brokerage partners do not conduct proprietary trading. These firms are highly regulated by several government agencies both nationally and internationally, and subject to regular routine audit inquiries from their various regulators. Since many of our employees may also have personal BambooBoss accounts, we place a professional, as well as a personal, vote of confidence in our prime brokerage partners.
Independent Fund Administrator provides fund administration verifying all real estate, assets, trades, positions and cash balances directly with our Appraisers, Prime Brokers and Custodians. Administrator completes and is the custodian of the fund’s books and records. Administrator uses independent services to evaluate portfolios and calculate Net Asset Values (NAVs). Independent Custodian receives subscriptions and Administrator has sole control of transferring funds to and from Prime Brokers for subscriptions, redemptions, and allocations. It is important that an independent, unbiased administrator is used that has no financial interest in the fund. Our independent fund administrator, TBD (US) Inc., may be contacted by email or telephone for a professional reference for BambooBoss.
A Prime Broker and Custodian maintain accounts, execute trades and is custodian of securities and cash for the fund. Prime Brokers confirm cash balances, trades, settlements, and financings on a daily basis and together with fund Custodian integrate with Administrator, who confirms directly with the executing broker dealer. Independent Custodian receives subscriptions and Administrator has sole control of transferring funds to and from Prime Brokers for subscriptions, redemptions, and allocations. It is important that an independent, unbiased Prime Broker is used that has no financial interest in the fund.
In the unlikely event that BambooBoss were to cease doing business, our independent fund Administrator would give you the option to transfer your account to a new firm or to liquidate your holdings and wire back your account proceeds.
BambooBoss invests in Central and South Florida undervalued performing and non performing large tract citrus groves, as well as raw fertile land to be converted to commercial bamboo plantations. BambooBoss’s approach is to create non correlated portfolios to generate superior returns and to control risk in the event of a volatile market event. Proper risk management should be one of your most important considerations when investing your money.
BambooBoss is prohibited from posting on its website a client’s positive review or favorable statement (a “testimonial”) or even from linking to such a testimonial if one of our clients posts such an endorsement on another site. We are careful to comply with the regulations regarding this restriction, which is why you will not find a public section on our website asking for client feedback. You are always free to email us privately.
Subscription Document
BambooBoss designed its Subscription Document to ask questions to accurately determine an investor’s risk tolerance. Our final list of questions was developed after a comprehensive survey of the academic research on the topic and includes income, assets, experience, and levels of risk tolerance. All investors in BambooBoss’s Funds must be Accredited Investors. Some online free risk assessment questionnaires only look at subjective willingness to take risk. BambooBoss’s multi-tiered approach to assessing risk evaluates:
- An investor’s subjective willingness to take risk
- An investor’s consistency in response to subjective risk assessment
- An investor’s objective ability to take risk based on his or her projected retirement income compared to her projected retirement spending needs
We ask subjective risk questions to both determine the level of risk an investor is willing to take and the consistency among their answers. For example, if an investor is willing to take a lot of risk in one case and very little in another, then he or she is inconsistent and is therefore assigned a lower risk tolerance score than the simple weighted average of her answers. Among our subjective questions we ask two that are likely to be extremely relevant to our accredited investor audience: whether they own stock options or have made investments in alternative investment funds before. We believe the answers to these two questions are critical to an accurate assessment of an investor’s willingness to take risk. We ask objective questions in order to estimate with as few questions as possible whether the investor is likely to have enough money saved at retirement to afford her likely spending needs. The greater the excess income, the more risk the client is able to take. We believe that our focused, short list of questions is far more effective in identifying an investor’s true risk tolerance than some longer lists of questions that we have seen other financial advisors use.
We look for undervalued assets, some that we can improve ourselves so that they can perform better, such as citrus groves and raw fertile land. This can generate a return regardless whether the broader markets are up or down. Among others, targeted assets in question must meet certain liquidity and sufficient volume constraints.
The greatest fear for investors these days is investing in good stocks, bonds or good stock funds only to have another string of bad news come out of Europe, China, Japan, or the U.S. and cause most markets to drop faster than they went up. As we all know, stocks seem to take the escalator up and the elevator down (think of patterns on stock charts). These crashes have never been more frequent and more severe than during the past few years. In 2011 for example, it took the first 8 months to accumulate some pretty great returns in stocks only to have them vanish into thin air during August’s market drop. Here’s an interesting fact: The Dow Jones (DJIA) traded at a high of 11723 in January, 2000. Surprisingly the DJIA traded at that same level in early 2012. So every $1.00 placed in good stocks or good stock funds in year 2000 that closely tracked the broader markets would still be worth $1.00 12 years later. This example doesn’t take in to consideration inflation, commissions, fees and other costs, making the value of this dollar even less. Because of this, many have unnecessarily avoided the stock market lately. Conversely, BambooBoss Growth Partners actively manages your funds and employs strategies that can generate greater returns than a typical buy and hold strategy.
BambooBoss invests your money all at once. The benefit of investing in a portfolio of relatively uncorrelated asset classes is that when one asset class is up, it is likely that others are down. Therefore timing of when you invest is relatively unimportant.
Research has shown that rebalancing a portfolio’s holdings makes more sense when each asset class has drifted from its target allocation by a certain percentage (i.e., threshold based) rather than on a set time basis (e.g., quarterly or semiannually). Therefore, we continuously monitor the fund and periodically rebalance it back to its target mix. We are not able to predict when we are likely to rebalance because it depends on the performance of each of the asset classes. We also use deposits, withdrawals and reinvestment of dividends as opportunities for interim rebalancing to minimize the taxable gains that can arise from threshold-based rebalancing.
Account-Related
In order to open an account, a prospective investor should complete and execute the Subscription Agreement. Once complete, it must be emailed or sent via Fed Ex. Two forms of identification should be included, preferably a government issued form of ID as well as a utility bill confirming your address.
BambooBoss currently supports taxable accounts, including institutional, commercial and individual investment, joint and trust accounts. We also support Traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs and Simplified Employee Pension (SEP) IRAs. Please email us to open an account type not listed.
Institutional investors, corporate retirement plan sponsors and certain qualified individuals may open a BambooBoss account.
The minimum to open a corporate account is $5,000,000 and $1,000,000 for an individual account (manager may approve less on a case by case basis).
Yes. Please let us know that it will be an IRA account and we will assist in the transfer of an existing account. Once completed, your IRA will automatically transfer in 5-8 business days.
Yes. To roll over a 401(k) into an IRA, open an IRA account with BambooBoss and let us know you would like to “rollover” during the application process. Once your IRA account is open, you should contact your 401(k) provider and instruct them to send a check for the entire value of your 401(k). The check should be made payable to BambooBoss and should reference your account name and your IRA account number. The check should be sent to:
BambooBoss Growth Partners I LP
Managed by BambooBoss Growth Partners LLC
Sarasota Office
1990 Main Street
Seventh Floor
Sarasota, Florida 34236
(941) 208-2000 IR@bbgrowthpartners.com
Although the rollover is not a taxable event, your 401(k) provider will issue you a 1099. If you would like to roll over to a Roth IRA, this is a two-step process: first you will open a Traditional IRA account with Pelican Hill and then contact us to convert to a Roth IRA.
You are welcome to open as many accounts as you would like as long as each has a minimum of $1,000,000.
BambooBoss’s Funds are only available with accounts opened at our brokerage partners. In order to provide our service, BambooBoss must have the ability to electronically invest for all of its accounts, which is not currently available at a reasonable price from any of the consumer-focused brokerage firms.
To access your Net Asset Value (NAV) and account information, log in to our corporate website and click My Account at the top of the page.
Funding
Capital contributions may be made by wire transfer or by check. When the funds arrive, we will send you an email confirming receipt. The independent fund administrator will notify each new investor of their value date (the day they are active in the fund) and will send a confirmation of documents and funds receipt. Monthly Statements of Net Asset Value (NAV) are emailed to all investors by the 15th of the following month. Additionally, Statements and NAV can always be accessed at the administrator’s website.
To deposit additional funds to your account you may use the same wire instructions as your original account opening deposit. When the funds arrive, we will send you an email confirming receipt. The independent fund administrator will send a confirmation of the funds receipt.
Before transfer, you will need to sell all mutual funds, bonds and/or equity holdings.
Please contact us by email or phone with any account-related question, problem or suggestion.
Withdrawals
To withdraw some of the funds in your account, send us an email with your instructions. There is no penalty to withdraw and with 60 days’ notice funds (after the lock up period) will be wired back to your originating account at the end of the month
To withdraw all of the funds in your account, send us an email with your instructions. There is no penalty to withdraw and with 60 days’ notice funds (after the lock up period) will be wired back to your originating account at the end of the month. After the withdrawal is complete, we will close your account, as we do not maintain accounts with a zero balance.
BambooBoss does not charge fees when you withdraw funds or close your account.
Fees & Commissions
BambooBoss does not charge brokerage fees. Instead BambooBoss charges a performance fee of 50% and a management fee of 6%. It is noteworthy that performance of the fund is reported as “net” of both fees after they have been subtracted. A performance fee is a fee that an alternative investment fund is charged by the investment manager that manages its assets, calculated by reference to the increase in the fund’s net asset value (or “NAV”), which represents the value of the fund’s investments. Performance fees are widely used by the investment managers of alternative investment funds, which typically charge a performance fee of 25-50% or more of the increase in the NAV of the fund. An example might be as follows: An investor subscribes for shares worth $1,000,000 in a fund. Over the next year the NAV of the fund increases by 10%, making the investor’s shares worth $1,100,000. Of the $100,000 increase, 50% (i.e. $50,000) will be paid to the investment manager, thereby reducing the NAV of the fund by that amount and leaving the investor with shares worth $1,050,000, giving a return of 5% before deduction of any other fees. As well as a performance fee, an alternative investment fund will charge a management fee, typically calculated as 6% of the NAV of the fund, regardless of whether the fund has generated any returns for the investor. This fee is based on the assets under management and is charged 1/12th of the 6% monthly, or .50%.
Tax-Related
Your tax documents are provided by BambooBoss’ independent fund administrator and/or tax advisor. BambooBoss does not provide individual tax advice, and you should consult your tax advisor regarding any questions you may have specific to your personal taxes and financial situation. BambooBoss assumes no responsibility to any client for the tax consequences of any transaction.
The main difference between a Traditional and a Roth IRA is when you pay income taxes on the money you put in the plans. With a Traditional IRA, your contribution is tax deductible and you don’t pay taxes on the contribution amount until you later withdraw it (either upon retirement or early with a penalty). A contribution to a Roth IRA is not tax deductible; you pay taxes before the contribution, but you do not pay taxes later on the amount you withdraw. In addition, with a Roth IRA, you can leave the money in for as long as you want, letting it grow as you continue to age. With a Traditional IRA, by contrast, you must start withdrawing the money when you reach age 70½. Roth IRA contributions are limited by income level. In general, you can contribute to a Roth IRA for 2012 if you have taxable income and your modified adjusted gross income is either:
- Less than $173,000 if you are married filing jointly;
- Less than $110,000 if you are single, head of household, or married filing separately (if you did not live with your spouse at any time during the previous year); or
- Less than $10,000 if you’re married filing separately and you lived with your spouse at any time during the previous year.
A Roth IRA is more appropriate when you are younger since you have a longer time for tax-free accumulation. Most studies suggest that the cutoff age is around 50. However, a Roth IRA is not appropriate for people who will be in a zero or very low tax bracket when they retire. If you do not foresee the need to draw on your IRA in retirement then you will want to fund a Roth IRA. Of course, none of us have a crystal ball, so you may want to hedge by splitting your contributions across both a Roth and a Traditional IRA (say 50/50) if you don’t know what your income is likely to be upon retirement. If you’re a young professional who has a high potential upside to your income, then you’re probably better off with a Roth. If you expect your income to only grow with inflation then you’re probably better off with a 50/50 split until the future starts to become clearer and then adjust accordingly. Please consult your tax advisor to determine what is best for you.