How to explain what an umbrella trust is in an easy-to-understand way? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

Umbrella trust refers to the establishment of a number of sub-trust units under a trust plan account, which are independent of each other and independently carry out investment operation and liquidation. The way of using funds, the term of use and the expected income can be completely different. Each trust unit is actually a small trust, and the trust company manages and monitors each trust unit through the trading system and information technology.

In practice, umbrella trust is mostly used in the field of securities investment, and each trust unit will be designed into a hierarchical structure (priority fund and inferior fund), from which the unique characteristics of umbrella trust products are derived.

In terms of structural design, a private equity institution (which can also be a natural person, or in most cases a private equity institution) is a secondary trust unit by introducing priority funds. All the funds of the sub-trust are operated by inferior investors, and the sub-trust also has systems such as early warning line and stop loss line.

Sub-trust is essentially a small sunshine private placement (that is, structured trust), while umbrella trust changes the original sunshine private placement of one account into "one-to-many", and multiple private placement institutions jointly bear the "channel fee" of a securities account, thus greatly weakening the impact of the suspension policy.

Because the disadvantages are mainly aimed at small and medium-sized private placements and powerful natural persons, umbrella trusts have long been characterized by low threshold, relatively low leverage ratio and flexible term.