Amerindo Investment Advisors

Amerindo Investment Advisors Inc.

Amerindo's logo, circa 1997
Industry	Investment services
Headquarters	399 Park Avenue, 22nd Floor New York City, New York One Embarcadero Center Suite 2300 San Francisco, California 43 Upper Grosvenor Street London, England
Key people	Alberto Vilar Gary Tanaka

399 Park Avenue, 22nd Floor New York City, New York

One Embarcadero Center Suite 2300 San Francisco, California

43 Upper Grosvenor Street

Amerindo Investment Advisors Inc. was an Investment services firm, best known for making large profits during the Dot-com boom of the 1990s and 2000s.

The origins of the company date to the early 1980s, when Vilar and Tanaka founded two companies named "Amerindo" in England and Panama. The American branch, called "Amerindo Investment Advisors Inc." was founded in 1985.

The East Coast office was located in the 399 Park Avenue in New York City, the West Coast office, and "principal place of business" was located at One Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, and the international office was in London.

Vilar made an early and very successful investment in Yahoo!, which once totaled 40% of the fund's investment portfolio. Vilar's financial strategy included investing in purchasing shares of companies shortly after their initial public offering.

The company's "flagship" financial product, the "Amerindo Technology Fund," was known for investing in startup high tech and Dot-com companies. Following many years of strong growth during the internet boom the fund came to a crash.

Vilar gained a lot of press for declaring the internet to be "bigger than the Industrial Revolution."

Amerindo had advertised that its "Guaranteed Fixed Rate Deposit Account" (GFRDA) would be invested in "high quality, short-term deposits" that would produce a "fixed-rate of interest for a fixed-term." Instead, these funds were invested in risky dot com ventures, and the fund lost large sums after the 2000 dot-com bust, which meant that Amerindo couldn't repay the investors, costing investors millions of dollars.