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You and VCM's Website – Summary
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You may never have dealt with a limited partnership, and the notion of filling out the Qualification Form and verifying your status as an “accredited investor” may strike you as uncomfortable and perhaps even intrusive. We certainly do not wish to make you uncomfortable, or to intrude, but once a money management firm has chosen to use limited partnerships as the legal form for managing its clients’ investments, government regulations pretty much determine many of the procedures that you will encounter here.
These procedures call for limited access to much documentation, absolutely restricted access to all data on past performance, and the need to sign relatively voluminous partnership agreements. All General Partners of limited partnerships must adhere to these government regulations, and our ways of dealing with prospects reflect that common fact. However, regulation is where the similarity of our respective methods comes to an end.
We rely on this website to bring you substantially all the information that you may need in order to study VCM, research its past returns and finally, sign the partnership agreements. This method provides you with a fair degree of anonymity, little need to endure unwanted sales calls, and the ability to proceed with the process of study and decision making at your own pace. Of course, we are available to answer your questions.
While we welcome the occasional visit to our offices by a qualified prospect, the scheduling of such visits is always subject to our overriding priority: serving the existing limited partners by concentrating on investing their stakes.
There is a great deal of information here, and we hope it will allow you to make a comfortable decision.
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You and VCM's Website – in Depth
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Out of necessity, many of you will first go through the process of being a Visitor with no access to the restricted areas, then a Registered Guest, and later, perhaps, an Observer. You may or may not feel comfortable about using a website to study VCM.
We prefer not to print and mail brochures and thick agreements. We rely on this website to deliver substantially all information that you may need to study VCM, research its past returns and, finally, to sign the partnership agreements. These partnership agreements are available for you to review online, but at the end they either must be agreed to by email, or must be signed and physically delivered to us.
No salesman will call and urge you to make a decision. However, the well-known propensity of many individuals to procrastinate with their money management decisions will go unchecked when dealing with VCM. This procrastination is often ameliorated by the calls from a salesman urging the prospect to finally make a decision. If you procrastinate, we will not know, and we will not call you or even send you a reminder email – you will have to check your procrastination, if any, on your own.
So, if you are looking for gold-gilded folders stuffed with brochures with colorful pictures inevitably depicting yachts (printed for the generation that has already forgotten the origin of the famous question, “And where are the customers’ yachts?!”), then this website may be disappointing for you. Instead, we have deliberately chosen the simplest, clearest, and devoid of bells-and-whistles website to allow you easy access to as much information as possible about VCM
Yet, this website-centered process will not be for everyone. We will listen to your comments on how to improve our website-centered communications, and we will, of course, appreciate your reports on bugs and difficulties with navigation, but VCM is committed to using this website-centered process. Asking VCM to provide you with something you may be more familiar and comfortable with, i.e., a process revolving around salesmen and glossies, if this happens to be the case, may become a frustrating exercise for you.
Perhaps the following analogy will help you to understand our view of the website-centered model: Remember the first years of Amazon.com? There were plenty of people who swore that they would never buy a book unless they could touch it, look at it, leaf through it, and, perhaps, have a cup of coffee while doing this. With time, some of them did become Amazon clients, but some continued shopping only at Barnes & Noble and Borders. Both business models thrive, and the book buyers have eventually sorted out their preferences.
However, not all website-centered processes are the same. Some of our observers who feel at home with a website-centered process, may long for brief, five minute PowerPoint presentations covering all that they “need to know” to make a decision. We are not likely to offer such presentations which seem to be the staple of the hedge-fund industry. We have observed that, more often than not, fast decisions to invest will lead to snap decisions to withdraw the investment down the road.
The funds managed by VCM have the same legal structure as hedge funds (i.e., they are organized as limited partnerships), but that’s about all that makes VCM partnerships similar to hedge funds.
Once you gain access to the restricted areas of this website, you will see that it is far more detailed than most websites you have reviewed previously. Our website is most likely more detailed than the printed marketing materials you may have received in the past, and intentionally so. We want you to make a thoughtful decision about becoming a partner. Our partnerships invest for the long term. “Trial” investments by some limited partners “to see what happens” and withdrawn after a few months are of no interest to us. These short-term investments do not match our investment horizon, and they may damage the returns of the long-term partners whose well-being is our paramount concern.
These “trial” investments, not well-thought-out at either end of the investment process, may hurt our long-term investors because of transaction costs, tax ramifications, and the dissipation of the portfolio manager’s attention. We always guard against running our business this way.
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Hedge Funds, VCM, and You
In this document, we describe how we view our relationship with potential and actual limited partners as compared to relationships prevalent in the hedge funds arena.
This document is restricted and requires access privileges.
Please Click here to see the document.
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