Browsing: Debt Types of Private Equity

A new analyst report looks at what is in store for the private markets given Covid-19, an impending economic slowdown, and energy price volatility. It argues that we are entering a bear different from other bears. This bear market may be part of a transition that will increase the roleRead More

Unicorns (privately owned start-ups with a valuation of at least $1 billion) have long been the great sought-after beasts of the VC and PE worlds. But are they good for the planet? The unicorn boom was driven by the combination of easy credit and old-fashioned hype, combined with the wayRead More

It is widely believed that much of the world is now experiencing the late stages of a bull market. There will be a downturn because no tree grows to the sky. Forecasting the nature and severity of the coming downturn is tricky, but perhaps that is not the right question.Read More

John Bowman, CFA, Senior Managing Director at CAIA Association “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond.” (Mr. White to 007, Spectre) Despite the crystal blue island water, softly rolling Caribbean tide, and perfect skies outside the hotel all week, I opened my conference wrap-up panel reminding delegates forRead More

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s wealthiest humans, attracted a good deal of attention last fall by saying, “Divestment, to date, probably has reduced about zero tons of emissions.” He thereby put his finger on a key fault line amongst those who regard ESG investmentRead More

It is reasonable to expect that a diversified hedge fund portfolio will make more modest returns in 2020 than it did in 2019, according to Agecroft Partners, which has done its usual January crystal-ball gazing on the new year, looking for the top industry trends and how they may playRead More

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has taken a 30% stake in Bayfront Infrastructure Management. Clifford Capital, with the backing of the government of Singapore, has the other 70%. They have created Bayfront (with a combined capitalization of $180 million) to mobilize  a pool of infrastructure investors in the expectation thatRead More

What’s in the future for alternative investments asset management? A new publication from Ernst & Young, London, contends that allocations to alternative investments and are “robust,” but that there is an important shift underway in favor of private equity and at the expense of hedge funds. In 2018, 40% ofRead More

The term “greater fool theory” refers to the many circumstances in which speculators buy a (potentially) productive asset, basing their buy decision not on the asset’s operational value, but on the notion that there is a “greater fool” out there who will pay even more. The term refers, then, toRead More

A recent publication from Fidelity Institutional Asset Management, while looking at the money markets in the US, emphasizes that investors are looking for liquidity. The report, written by Kerry Pope and Chris Lewis, each an institutional portfolio manager with FIAM, begins with a discussion of the Federal Reserve’s September rateRead More

In  a new report, Pitchbook looks at the mergers and acquisitions trends in Europe. In 2019 through September, the value of European M&A is lower than it has been since 2014, and the volume is lower than it has been since 2010. Only two sectors did not see year-on-year declinesRead More

By John L. Bowman, CFA This editorial first appeared on Sept. 18 in Crain’s Pensions & Investments online edition. It’s open season on private equity in the Democratic presidential debates. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and others have made attacking “Wall Street” a major plank in their campaign platforms.Read More

Private equity middle market deal-making did well in the first half of 2019, matching the pace of 2018, which was a record-setting year, according to a new report from Pitchbook. The authors credit the usual suspects with this continued vigor: lots of dry powder; low interest rates; and continued economicRead More

PitchBook’s Adam Putz recently tackled the intensifying political scrutiny of Big Tech and the harm the scrutineers may do by trying to fix something that isn’t broken—the merger and acquisitions market for digital startups. The giants in the field (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google and its parent, Alphabet) are associated withRead More

Intralinks has put out its predictions for mergers and acquisitions activity through the remainder of this year. The Intralinks Deal Flow Predictor tracks early-stage deal activity to predict how many deals have reached public-announcement stage six months on. The latest issue of the SS&C Intralinks Deal Flow Predictor also includesRead More

David Stevenson, a US District Court Judge for the Northern District of Texas, has presented his analysis of the  differences between the law in the United Kingdom and the United States concerning “a debtor’s ability to approve a restructuring arrangement over the objection of creditors that disapprove.” This is moreRead More

Cowen’s Capital Introduction Group has compiled information on what the endowment and foundation community is thinking about hedge funds and how best to invest in them. The Cowen paper on the subject begins with the observation, drawn from Preqin, that at present US-based E&Fs with more than $750 million inRead More

Many investors with long horizons are increasing their allocation to private equity funds: to extract the gains from managerial skill in that field, to reap the illiquidity premium, and simply to diversify. TIAA Endowment & Philanthropic Services has put out a paper on the creation and maintenance of a privateRead More

A forthcoming article in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law discusses the investor control rights typically negotiated in the private equity context in India. The article, by Arjya B. Majumdar, an associate professor at Jindal Global Law School, begins with the quantity of assets under management by theRead More

The agricultural sector is under pressure from several directions, including depressed commodity prices, increased regulation, climate change, and changes in consumer tastes. This pressure creates a demand for technological progress, and that in turn creates a market for agtech. Two years ago, Finisterre Ventures and Pitchbook combined their data gatheringRead More

A new study considers the proposition that indebtedness can reduce innovation. It offers support for the view that indebtedness in a particular context reduces patent flow. But whether patent flow should be considered a good surrogate for innovation remains open to question. An argument that has long been aimed atRead More

AllianceBernstein, the Nashville-based, asset management firm released a white paper on high-yield bank loans. Buying these loans seems, to some investors, a fix for the ongoing low-interest-rate environment. But the white paper is a warning. In two words, “buyer beware.”  The paper is the work of Douglas J. Peebles andRead More

Intralinks, the provider of inter-enterprise collaboration products that is perhaps best known for its Deal Flow Predictor, recently interviewed Paul Aversano, a managing director at the consultancy Alvarez & Marsal. Aversano leads A&M’s private equity services practice, and he is the global practice leader of the transaction advisory group. HeRead More

By Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association This now famous line was uttered by then citizen Ronald Reagan almost 40 years ago in a presidential debate with the incumbent Jimmy Carter. It was a simple and clever turn of a phrase acting as a counter-punch to Carter’s excoriation of Reagan’s priorRead More

The state of alternative lending and pertinent regulation within the European Union is the topic of a new white paper co-authored by Allen & Overy, the multinational law firm, and the Alternative Credit Council (an affiliate of AIMA). The paper begins with the observation that over the last four yearsRead More

The 2019 edition of McKinsey’s annual review of private investment markets is now available. One of the themes of the new edition is that private markets have gone mainstream. Since 2002, private equity’s net asset value has grown twice as fast as global public equities. Looking at that growth fromRead More

The illiquidity premium is one of the most frequently discussed and hotly disputed subjects in financial economics. Speaking broadly, an investment is not a checking account. One generally cannot just “get the cash back” at a moment’s notice, by visiting some equivalent of an ATM. How long will it takeRead More

A recent study of public employee retirement systems in the United States reaches conclusions, that, after a fair amount of “grey tsunami” alarmism in recent years, sound reassuring. The study, based on a recent survey of system managements conducted by the National Conference of Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS) inRead More

Two scholars affiliated with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Waterloo, Canada, have taken a look at the future of green bonds, that is, bonds whose proceeds are employed to fund environmental initiatives. The paper, by Olaf Weber and Vasundhara Saravade, begins with a guesstimate as to the amount ofRead More

In the closing months of 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman and his army marched notoriously “to the sea,” from Atlanta to Savannah. In the opening weeks of 1865, Sherman followed this up with his “Carolinas campaign,” again working to destroy the productive infrastructure, in a path that took him toRead More

A new study of hedge funds that are engaged in the venture capital space, written by George O. Aragon, Emma Li, and Laura Lindsey, contends that some hedge funds quite successfully exploit their expertise in the value of the publicly owned portion of specific industries when they enter the private/ventureRead More

An agtech-focused venture firm has issued a report about global VC activity across agtech and its subsectors. The firm, Finistere Ventures, which describes itself as in the business of helping “ambitious founders transform food and agriculture,” collaborated with Pitchbook in preparing the review. Finistere looks specifically at: (a) macro trends,Read More

On Dec. 6, in Tokyo, Japan, the SuperReturn Japan 2018 event concluded. CAIA was a sponsor of this event, which was billed as “the world’s gateway to Japanese private equity and venture capital.” This is the second part and conclusion of our interview with Jeff Diehl, managing director at AdamsRead More

On Wednesday, December 5, in Tokyo, Japan, the SuperReturn Japan 2018 event convenes. CAIA is a sponsor of this event. Jeff Diehl, managing partner at Adams Street Partners, a multi-national investment manager with more than $35 billion in assets under management, is attending. He will participate in a panel WednesdayRead More

In the late 1980s, the chairman of The Foothill Group approached Edward I. Altman, already then well known for the creation of the Z-score used for predicting bankruptcy. The chairman asked Altman to develop a descriptive and analytical white paper on distressed debt. He obliged, writing first a paper onRead More

Intralinks has once again collaborated with Global Fund Media in a survey of limited partners on their satisfaction with recent results and on how they see global investment opportunities near-term. As to satisfaction: 18% of LPs say that their results from alternative investments have been better than they expected. ARead More

By Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association Many of us have had the experience of buying a home and often turn to the bank to provide some level of secured funding for that purchase. Banks, of course, require documentary evidence for the value of their collateral which, invariably, results in a market-based appraisal process resultingRead More

PitchBook has posted its 2018 VC Unicorn Report. The introduction explains the meaning of the term. (It has only been in use in its financial sense since 2013, so explanations may still be deemed necessary.) “Unicorn” refers to an entity upon which the private investment markets have bestowed a valuationRead More

In a new study by Harvard Business School scholars looks into the performance of LPs invested with private equity over four decades. In the paper, Investing Outside the Box, the scholars found that it is generally better to invest inside the box. Specifically, they found that the performance of alternativeRead More

A new study takes what is called a “first look” at the aggregate performance of private credit funds. Using data going back to 2004, the authors (two of whom are affiliated with Adams Street Partners) determine that private credit funds “have performed about as well, or better than, leveraged-loan, high-yield,Read More

Illuminate Ventures, an early-stage high-tech VC firm, has posted a paper by its founder and managing partner, Cindy Padnos, on “gender differences in entrepreneurship.” The paper begins with the observation that nearly half of the Illuminate portfolio companies have a woman as a co-founder. This doesn’t mean of course thatRead More

The Association of Asian American Investment Managers holds its Chicago Regional event on Thursday, July 26 at the offices of law firm Sidley Austin LLP, One South Dearborn, beginning at 3 and continuing until 7. AAAIM confidently proclaims that its line-up of panelists is a collection of “rock stars.” AmongRead More

A new book by the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, works as a compelling test case in how the hunger for the next “unicorn,” a hunger that has been a feature in alternative investing for years now, can go badlyRead More

Los Angeles-based Cliffwater LLC has recently updated a report it prepared a year ago on how state pension systems have fared by way of their investments in private equity. The report as updated finds that PE created on average a 10.7% annualized return across 21 state pensions over its 16-yearRead More

A new report published by the Copenhagen Business School looks into the consequence of private equity investment on an industry-by-industry basis. The authors find that “industries where private equity funds invest grow more quickly [than others] in terms of total production and employment, and appear less exposed to aggregate shocks.”Read More

The Alternative Credit Council, an affiliate of the Alternative Investment Management Association, has put out a paper on the present state of the private credit industry, considering both the demand (from borrowers) for its services and the supply (from investors) of capital to lend. In preparing this paper, the ACCRead More

Preqin has issued a new report on global private debt. It begins with the observation that assets under management in the private debt industry (defined as the uncalled capital commitments plus the unrealized value of portfolio assets) have quadrupled in the last ten years, reaching $595 billion as of theRead More

BNY Mellon has put out a new white paper about the alternative credit market, that is, about debt funds and the space where they dwell. The paper looks at six points: macro background; investor demand; supply-side response; regulatory context; managerial difficulties; and the role of service providers. This precis willRead More

By Diane Harrison It’s been years since investors have been able to get excited about the term “yield” when referencing their investment portfolio. Too many individuals have been hanging onto cash while searching fruitlessly for somewhere other than equities to put their money to work. Advisors haven’t been much helpRead More