Allan Weiss, CEO and founder of Market Shield Capital, LLC and developer of the methodology underlying the Market Shield™ mortgage, has spent most of his career creating and providing indexed-based risk management products for the mortgage industry. Allan co-founded and served as chief executive officer of Case Shiller Weiss, Inc. for 12 years, a business purchased by Fiserv, Inc., in 2002. His experience with the Fiserv transaction led him to the development of the Market Shield™ structure.

During the Fiserv transaction, Allan experienced first-hand that a dollar earned by a large enterprise adds more value than a dollar earned by an equivalent but smaller enterprise. It occurred to him then that if similar smaller entities could partially join their cash flows into a fund, without disturbing the incentives of each entity’s management to optimize their individual entity’s value, then this combined fund should be worth more than the sum of each separate cash flow. A dollar earned from a large entity adds more value than a dollar earned by a smaller entity.

It also occurred to Allan that a way to join such entities’ cash flows into a fund is for each entity to receive cash from the fund and pay back to the fund according to an index of the fortunes of the similar entities, rather than from their profits. This way (for example), if industry earnings rise but an individual entity’s earning rise more, that entity’s owners retain the value of their over-performance. Also, this fund structure creates a risk/opportunity sharing mechanism between the fund’s investors and the entity, which creates additional value.

Allan applied for a patent on this investment structure and was granted US Patent # 7155468 in December 2006. He subsequently founded Market Shield Capital, LLC and put in place the infrastructure and organization to provide a) the Market Shield™ Mortgages, which protect a building owner’s cash flow and b) Market Shield™ Real Estate Fund, LP, to give investors returns correlated to the particular markets in which the fund invests.