Wunder Capital Offers Investors Unique Exposure To The Solar Industry

• Wunder Capital offers high-yield investment funds in diversified commercial solar projects.
• According to the company, these funds offer low-volatility, low-risk exposure to the solar industry.
• The difficult commercial solar financing environment allows Wunder to be extremely selective in choosing its projects.

Benzinga recently had the chance to speak with Sam Beaudin, Head of Product at Wunder Capital, about how investors can earn 6.0 percent returns by investing in Wunder’s commercial solar installation project funds. For investors looking to profit off of the solar revolution without being exposed to the volatility and unpredictability of the stock market, Wunder’s funds could be a good investment choice.

How does it work?
Wunder has a national network of regional U.S. solar installation partners. These partners send Wunder commercial-scale solar installation projects, and Wunder selects the most promising and low-risk projects to add to its funds.

“Accessing commercial-scale solar financing has the same kind of difficulties that small business financing in general has,” Beaudin told Benzinga. “There’s not a good FICO equivalent for banks to use, so you don’t have a turn-key financing mechanism.”

The result is that there are a number of attractive smaller commercial-scale solar projects available for Wunder to choose from to create its investment funds.

Risk
When Benzinga asked about the risk level of the projects that Wunder takes on, Beaudin said that the company is highly-selective and chooses only the very best projects that its partners have to offer.

“I would say our risk evaluation process is the most rigorous in the solar industry,” Beaudin explained. “We’re going after a sector, commercial solar, that is really struggling to get financing…so we can be incredibly selective about which projects we put out investors’ capital into.”

He added that, of the projects that Wunder receives from its installer partners, the company accepts less than 10 percent.

Returns
Beaudin told Benzinga that its investors can expect to draw a fixed annual income of around 6.0 percent from the company’s funds, a higher yield than many green bonds and yield cos produce. The high yield specifically appeals to fixed income investors who want to avoid the type of volatility that solar stocks have been subject to in recent months.

In the past six months, solar stocks First Solar, Inc FSLR, SolarCity Corp SCTY, SunPower Corporation SPWR and SunEdison Inc SUNE have all fallen by 10 percent or more.


How to invest
For now, Wunder is only accepting accredited investors, but Beaudin hopes that the company can eliminate that requirement somewhere down the line and make its funds more widely-available. Accredited investors can sign up now on the company’s website and begin by committing as little as $1,000 to a diversified solar portfolio.

Disclosure: the author holds no position in the stocks mentioned.