Pink Floyd’s Private Equity Songs

The temptation of another private equity musical license was too strong to resist – the titles of some of the most famous songs and albums of one of my favorite rock groups may seem to have been made on purpose to introduce and comment upon certain highly debated arguments in the PE industry.

Hey Hey My My, Private Equity Can Never Die

One of the likely most memorable achievements of David Rubenstein will be not about private equity, in the strict sense – it will be the rap he sang in the Carlyle’s 2014 Holiday message to investors. Musical license for musical license, he might as well have come up with a rock song to introduce his recent predictions about the evolution private equity industry. Neil Young would forgive that it is me instead to “use” the song for a few related comments.

Stranded Capital, Fire Sales Or….

I wrote in my previous post that actual durations of PE funds are longer than those that are the perceived industry standards. The 14-year number reported in the headline of an article of a recognised magazine is a different thing, but it ties well and allows some reasoning about LP extensions, fire sales and the possible rational alternatives for investors.

PE Duration Disambiguated (Smooth Capital)

Getting responses to questionnaires is an art and I can’t say I master it. Nevertheless, I had a few especially kind readers of my previous post who contributed their opinion (thanks!) to the embedded polls. Their results make it more interesting and “independent” to define “surprising” certain different data available in the industry.

The PE S-Curve, Dug Out

There are a couple of concepts that qualify a discovery – even if just stumbled upon: novelty and usefulness. With respect to private equity, the S-Curve adds the notion of decreasing marginal returns to improve the mainstream J-Curve notion, and this clears novelty. What’s left now is to dig out its usefulness.

The PE S-Curve, Stumbled Upon

Unexpectedly last week, I stumbled upon an S-Curve hidden between the lines of a study released by an established private equity funds of funds firm with a cautious introductory question: “do private equity funds sometimes just run out of steam?”

Calpers, SEC and the Hawthorne Effect on PE

This morning a “must read” Pulse email caught my eye before my finger could enter the “default mode” and hit the delete key on my phone. The word science, spotted in the title, won my curiosity, sneaking in through my Galilean inclination.

What’s Up with Private Markets’ Secondary Prices?

There are some confusing messages out there about private markets’ secondary prices that are worth distilling to identify latent signals of opportunity and risk.

IRR Is Like Fish

IRR is like fish, when someone gets hold of it, it slips away. Hard to seize, hard to terminate – with incredible survival instinct, it tries to jump out of any bucket where it has been secluded.

Is Benchmarking IRRs against an IRR Benchmark an Apples for Apples Comparison?

This question, posed in a recent comment to my Fooled by IRRs post, deserves an answer in the form of a post. It has made me realize that the inaugural post of my blog, The Quartiles’ Oxymoron, was not as self-explanatory as I thought it was.