Cox Capital builds interval fund repurchase database

Cox Capital Partners launched the Interval Fund Transparency Project, a repository of interval fund repurchase data drawn from public filings, sponsor confirmations and repurchase confirmations submitted by shareholders and financial advisers.

Cox Capital has already built the repository from publicly available information and has asked certain fund sponsors to review their funds' data and confirm or supplement it, according to Alternative Credit Investor. Shareholders and financial advisers will be able to help fill the remaining gaps by submitting repurchase confirmations showing the shares they requested. Cox Capital reviews each submission before adding it.

The repository's unit is the fill rate: the percentage of shares submitted for repurchase that a fund accepted during a given repurchase window. A 25% fill rate means the fund repurchased one-quarter of the shares shareholders asked to sell.

Advisers comparing interval funds will be able to see how oversubscribed each repurchase window was, instead of working only from the dollar amount a fund repurchased. Interval funds report the shares they repurchased in shareholder reports and monthly filings, but disclosure of total requests is voluntary, so it is not widely known how oversubscribed repurchase programs are. Cox Capital noted that business development companies must periodically report shareholder redemption demand and repurchases, while interval funds are not subject to the same disclosure requirements.

"Interval funds are among the most popular vehicles for expanding retail access to private markets," said John Cox, founder and chief investment officer of Cox Capital Partners. "Without this information it is hard for advisers, and for fiduciaries especially, to make recommendations on a fully-informed basis, which may not be in their clients' best interests."

Cox said transparency needs to keep pace with access if private markets are to expand into the adviser channel.

Cox Capital also makes secondary-market offers for interval fund shares. On Nov. 5 it offered to buy Variant interval fund shares at a 40% discount, as Interval Fund Daily previously reported.