Ways to outperform the market in these troubled times

The general financials sector has slumped by 46% and the FTSE 100 index has declined by over 30% year-to-date (at time of writing) which has caused a large amount of investors to diversify their portfolios away from traditional investments as a defensive hedge against the stock market volatility.

Some Investors are now seriously considering Angel Investment as a serious alternative to traditional investments. The Great British Pound (at time of writing) has been getting weaker day by day, and more and more foreign nationals are now looking at the UK as a serious place to invest their money into seed and early-stage type of investments as a result of all of the press around huge buy-outs and pay days for early investors in many start-up companies. None perhaps better known than Google which saw one angel investor make over $1 billion (£650 million) from an initial investment of just $100,000 (£65,000)!

The list continues with such success stories as uSwitch, a website which helps consumers compare and change suppliers of various services, that was sold for around £210 million! This company was launched like many of the others with a handful of early-stage investors and a reasonable amount of money to get started.

Though these are not your run of the mill angel investments, the average investor return has been an impressive 2.6 times the initial investment according to a study conducted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. That is an average internal rate of return (IRR) of 27%! Similar to the average IRRs seen by VC's!

In detail these finding found that angel investing had:
• Exits generated 2.6 times their invested capital in 3.5 years, which is in line with other types of private equity deals.
• Seven percent of exits generated returns above 10 times their initial investment.
The study also assessed how the following strategic factors impacted
the angel investors' outcomes:

Due diligence: Investors experienced better returns when they exercised more due diligence.

Industry expertise: Returns were nearly double for investments in ventures where the investor had related industry expertise.

Participation: After an angel makes an investment, his or her participation in the venture is significantly related to that venture's returns.

Follow-on investing: In ventures where follow-on investments were made, 70 percent of the exits occurred at a loss.

Venture Giant is an online service that allows investors to access a collection of alternative innovative high-growth investment proposals completely free of cost. All of the investment proposals listed on Venture Giant range from seed-capital for early stage start-ups to growth capital for profitable established UK businesses.

Investors using our service can also receive notifications of filtered deal-flow via email that match very specific investment and regional criteria from some of the brightest and most talented entrepreneurs in the UK all of whom are actively searching for investors to bring their dreams and companies to life.

In these unstable economic times the age old adage: 'angel investing is a risky alternative to traditional stocks and property investments' can now probably be challenged and if an investor has the money to take a few chances and likes the idea of getting in early, it can be very rewarding.

Venture Giant is used by business angels, investment groups, high-net-worth individuals, and self-certified sophisticated investors from the UK that are specifically seeking new and more effective ways to make the angel investment deal-flow sourcing process more easier and much more accessible.

Click here now to sign-up as a high net worth individual, or Angel Investor seeking alternative high return investment proposals.