From Mongolian football to the “Noodle Prince of Los Angeles”

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It has never been easier to invest in the ninth best team in the Mongolian Premier League.

Last Saturday, Brera Illich (formerly Bianzürich Sporting Illich) suffered a 6-1 loss in their first match under the control of Brera Holdings, the Nasdaq-listed “Social Impact Soccer (US Soccer)” company that owns other clubs in the region. North Macedonia. Italy and Mozambique. Think Todd Boehly's Blueco 22 but with much better players.

Brera shares have fallen nearly 70 percent since going public 14 months ago. The club's chief executive is Daniel J. McIlroy, an Italian-American investment banker – and self-described philanthropist – who is also managing director, head of equity capital markets and head of China at US insurance company Boustead Securities.

Brera's IPO was underwritten by Revere Securities, not Boustead. But Boustead has already worked on a $1.3 million private placement in 2022. As part of her compensation for that private placement, Brera issued her a five-year warrant to purchase up to 93,100 shares at $1 per share, “subject to adjustment,” according to Submission of the IPO for Brera.

When it comes to stock price performance, at least, the companies Boustead has sponsored have a patchy record. McIlroy admits that shares of the 14 companies it took public last year — including a sportswear marketing group inspired by Lionel Messi and a startup that sells pills to treat erectile dysfunction — have since fallen “sharply, and many are in the same range, between 70 And 80 percent.”

Some shareholders in Boustead's Chinese clients fared even worse. The Boca Raton-based broker has acquired seven small-cap Chinese companies since 2019, according to its websites. Of these companies, four enjoyed extraordinarily successful openings, rising hundreds or even thousands of percent in just a few days only to collapse soon after. Shares of the other three companies did not rise initially, but have since fallen more than 80 percent.

Speaking with us this week, McIlroy noted that the market for “some small company IPOs has not been good over the last two and a half years.”

With Brera, “the real value will be created through capital gains,” McIlroy said. “We intend to buy teams, like a Serie B side, and get the absolute value for two reasons: one would be eventual progress and perhaps promotion… and secondly, just get them inside a public vehicle, allowing liquidity and a higher share price so you can realize gains even before Sell ​​the difference.

Last year, McIlroy told FTAV that he had no idea why Bousted's underwritten IPOs tended to trade erratically. “There may be a background or almost an explanation for each of these things,” he said. “It boggles my imagination how and why this happened [the shares] They moved the way they did.”

McIlroy said in that 2023 interview that Boustead rejects “between two-thirds and 70 percent” of companies brought to him by auditors and legal firms, often Nasdaq itself. “We don't knock on doors, we do beauty contests to try to attract businesses.”

Those making the cut are featured on the broker's roster of nearly 3,000 investor clients, most of whom McClory said are “U.S.-based, ultra-high-net-worth private clients, family office-type investors, and in some cases smaller funds, but Not institutions [or] Names you may know.”

Friendly and generous with his time, McClory enjoys relaxing by serving on the board of the USA Track & Field Foundation, alongside more than 40 athletes, executives and notable figures, including Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman and novelist Nicholas Sparks. He also hangs out with aristocrat Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia, grandson of the last king of Italy.

The two friends even run a kind of company together – an AI-powered “immersive, futuristic, fantasy-based” MMORPG called The RoyaLand which appears to have been inspired by the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of England.

(Carb lovers may recognize Emanuel, wearing a hospitality hat, as “LA's actual pasta prince.”)

The RoyaLand project is still in development, though anyone desperate to know when they can play can ask McIlroy himself at Boustead's annual “Boca Bash” on March 21, or at the sixth annual Notte di Savoia Los Angeles three weeks later. .

Meanwhile, Brera Holdings shares themselves are a spectacle. It had already risen twice this year before jumping this week after McIlroy snapped up another 4.55 million shares, raising his stake to 54.5 percent.

With additional reporting from Alexandra Skaggs