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Most experienced investors know that when they are assessing investment opportunities, the right management team is vital.  This is even more true for smaller entrepreneurial companies, where the founding team is the driving force in the company’s growth strategy.

The problem is that if the founders have a track record of building successful companies then they will more than likely already have backers.  This is compounded by UK investors often being put off if the founders have been involved with unsuccessful companies.

The November 2017 Budget announced several changes to the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS). EIS is designed to help smaller trading companies to raise finance by offering a range of tax reliefs to investors.

The changes are part of the government’s Patient Capital Review of support for small businesses.

Below we look at the main changes and how they could affect private investors.

Every New Year brings the opportunity to address those things we feel we can do a little better.  That equally applies to our investment portfolio and is dependent upon assessing the opportunities for the year ahead.

Here we take a look at the prospects for:

Equities

Bonds

Property

Venture Capital

Bitcoin

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been mooted as the most transformative technology of the 21^st Century as we allow computer algorithms to run more aspects of our lives.

Amazon Echo, Apple’s Siri and Google Home all demonstrate consumer appetite for AI-enabled products.  Over the next few years, AI is expected to deliver driverless cars, better healthcare and truly smart homes.

The UK is rated in the top three countries for AI development and government figures suggest the UK’s AI industry could add £630 billion to the economy by 2035, increasing annual growth rates to more than during the boom decades of the fifties and sixties.

Professor Stephen Hawking has stated “once humans develop Artificial Intelligence, it will take off on its own and redevelop at an ever increasing rate.”

Below, we look at the achievements within AI to date and where it needs to develop to be truly transformative.

The Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) is an initiative by the UK government offering a range of attractive tax incentives to encourage investment into growth companies by private investors.

EIS has helped many small companies develop new technology, new drugs, engineering innovations, biotech, fintech and data processing solutions. The latest figures show over 24,500 UK businesses have raised more than £14 billion of development capital through the scheme.  This has proven vital for the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and a driving force in nurturing future UK growth.

In the November 2017 budget, the government doubled the investment limits for “knowledge intensive” companies.

Here we look at who ultimately benefits from such generous tax breaks?

With stock markets hitting all-time highs in 2017, there has been an increase in the number of highly-valued tech start-ups going public.

Four Unicorns, private companies valued at $1 billion or higher, completed initial public offerings (IPOs) in the second quarter 2017. That was double what was seen in the first quarter and equal to the number of Unicorn IPOs for the entire year in both 2015 and 2016, according to data compiled by Goldman Sachs.

Research from Play Bigger, a Silicon Valley consultancy that works with VC-backed start-ups, confirms that Unicorns are growing faster in recent years. Should investors be looking to jump on the bandwagon?

Blockchain allows people who have no particular confidence in each other to collaborate without having to go through a neutral central authority. Simply put, a blockchain creates trust.

Blockchain provides mass access to an open, collectively controlled record that cannot be changed and offers a very high level of protection through cryptography and mathematical algorithms. The combination of being open and yet highly secure seems to create confusion and distrust.  Below we delve into the details to explain further.

What to look for when assessing whether an emerging company has got what it takes to succeed.

• Innovation

  Small companies looking to compete with large, established incumbent players need an edge. Customers are more likely to look at unknown brands if they feel the product offers a benefit over competition, is easy to use and increases efficiency.

• Operate in existing markets

  It is generally harder to persuade customers to buy a product for the first time. Being the first product to market can offer greater upside however it also increases the risk of failure.  Many of the more successful technology companies have offered a new twist on existing products and have eventually replaced the incumbent market leader; Microsoft (IBM), Google (Yahoo), Apple (Nokia), Facebook (MySpace), Uber (Halo).

Will today’s technology powerhouses maintain their stranglehold on world tech for the next ten years and still be the companies we are talking about in 2027?

With the emergence of the technology powerhouses they have been grouped by acronyms GAFA, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, closely followed by NATU, Netflix, AirBnB, Tesla and Uber.  GAFA are very different companies to a number of years ago.  Google is part of the wide ranging technology company Alphabet; Apple offers a wide range of cloud based services and not just phone and iPads; Facebook is an advertising and media giant built around a social network; and Amazon has developed from an online book reseller across almost every vertical market imaginable. Such diversification has lead many to speculate whether GAFA have become too big to fail.