David Toll
How carry gets divvied up among senior partners has more to do with who founded the firm than with individual performance, according to recent research. Moreover, investors have been right to worry that carry distributed in this way can lead to departures. Such are the findings suggested by a recent examination of 717 private equity funds — largely buyout […]
They may not have Midtown Manhattan buildings named after them (a la the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at the New York Public Library), or own a version of Edvard Munch’s pastel, “The Scream,” acquired four years ago for more than $100 million by Leon Black. But Alfred Gantner, Marcel Erni and Urs Wietlisbach, co-founders of Zug, Switzerland-based private markets money […]
Perhaps no time in the history of the asset class have more investors said they have an appetite for funds run by emerging managers. Testing that demand in coming months will be Aldrich Capital Partners, Argand Partners and Soundcore Capital Partners. All three are either in the market with debut funds or expected to be by next year. Those in […]
Sovereign wealth funds manage staggering sums of money. But that doesn’t mean they’re so big they only invest with the likes of Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. From the New Zealand Superannuation Fund to the Saudi Arabia General Organization for Social Insurance, from the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation to the […]
Hycroft, a three-year-old New York investment bank serving both general partners and limited partners, has splashed into the principal investment business, launching a fund earmarked to purchase minority stakes in the management companies of mid-market buyout shops. Hycroft Capital LP set sail with a $750 million target in January, according to a source familiar with the fund. The effort is still […]
Despite my best intentions to get to the bottom of every story, I’ve recently run into a handful of private equity funds whose strategies and capital sources remain unfathomable. My calls and research led to some tantalizing tidbits but incomplete narratives. Pantheon Ventures manages $400 million for two mystery investors Pantheon Ventures, the London fund-of-funds manager with $32 billion in assets under management, filed Form Ds with […]
A decision last August by the National Labor Relations Board continues to throw into question the tidy arm’s length relationship that private equity shops have maintained with their portfolio companies. Under a worst case scenario, sponsors may find themselves involved in collective bargaining with unions at portfolio companies, liable for any unfair labor practices, and on the hook for pension contributions. […]
Does the stock market know something the rest of us don’t? The S&P 500’s more than 9 percent drop from New Year’s through February 10 suggests that the United States’s seven-year trot of economic growth, however plodding, may be heading for a concrete wall. And fears of an imminent recession have real consequences. Financial buyers, for one, won’t […]
About a year ago I wrote in this column that cracks were starting to appear in the credit markets used to finance leveraged buyouts. Those early cracks, after a reasonably steady start to 2015, have since widened into fractures. Behind those fractures lies a growing wedge of fears. Among the biggest is that a slowing world economy will leave many […]
Private equity is its own universe in many ways. But don’t expect that universe to be shielded from the same forces rumbling through the public equity markets in the first few weeks of January. A survey of some 60 deal professionals and investors conducted by Buyouts Insider in December and early January found 30 percent of respondents predicting that prices would […]