Keeping Score, Fast and Slow (Hint: It’s Not Just About the Game of Golf)

Most of the times ideas come up from unusual sources, often unexpectedly mixed. This is what has happened with this post, in which I am writing about how score keeping in the game of golf and decision making psychology can provide insights about the valuation of investment performance.

Asset Managers Are from Mars, Investors Are from Venus (Part 2 – A Space-Walk Down to Earth)

In the first part of this post, I wrote about how differently asset managers and investors react to stressfull situations, with the retreat to the cave of the ones contrasting with the need for increased communication and transparency of the others.

No Robo No Cry

It’s been a while since a good piece of thought leadership stroke a chord with my musical memory. But that happened this morning, when I read this on LinkedIn, shared in my network, from the March 25^th issue of The New York Times: Why I Don’t Make Financial Decisions on My Smartphone.

A Challenging Validation, “a contrario”

Over the past two weeks, the conversation and the exchange of emails with a highly reputable and quant skilled professional in the private equity industry have posed an interesting intellectual challenge and created a very useful opportunity for testing “a contrario” the DaRC methodology and for discussing the relation between duration and time horizon.

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.

Carlyle, Blackstone and Private Markets’ Beta

In the last few days, Carlyle first and Blackstone almost right after released investor updates and provided interesting information about the growth estimates of the value of their private equity funds for 2013 and the first quarter of 2014.

Putting the [α + β-Cen] Reports into Context

On monday night, earlier this week, Carlyle announced preliminary data regarding its funds’ first quarter valuations.

Introducing the [α + β-Cen] Reports

I am pleased to introduce first issue (number 0 in beta) of the [α + β-Cen] Reports whose objective is to provide “rational and quantitative” valuation indications and forecasting references to private markets’ fund investors.

No Liquidity without Price

The title of last week’s PEI‘s Friday Letter, “No Dice without Liquidity”, identifies the critical element determining the reported decision of KKR to stop promoting two retail products.