Whats next for Blue Sky?, page-43

The more I ponder this, I think the only viable way for BLA to go forward is to sell a material stake to a strategic investor (eg. Macquarie) who can help them seed new deals but more importantly start to restore their reputation.

The core of the business model of originating investment opportunities in alternative asset classes and offering them to HNWIs and SMSFs is sound, in fact my own business does a version of this. Compared to institutional investors, family offices, HNWIs and SMSFs are underinvested in alternative assets. I can see that a strategic investor would see value in the distribution platform that they have built, which has clearly been successful given the amount of third party capital that they have raised.

The problem is that BLA messed up the execution by (amongst many things) being untransparent with their market metrics, charging too high fees and overvaluing the assets to prop up their profits via unrealised performance fees. Now that this has come to light, their brand and investor trust is probably permanently damaged, without which they'll struggle to raise capital for new opportunities. Only a major strategic investor coming on board can act as a "reset" to turn the ship around.

IMO the manager of all of these assets should never have been listed. This is what created the conflict of interest in the first place - if the manager was private there would be no pressure to show earnings/FUM growth and they could focus on the core business of originating and managing good alternative investment opportunities.