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.

Relativity Theory, Money-Time Curvature and Private Capital Pricing

Wonder what relativity theory and money-time curvature have to do with rational pricing of private capital? The two quotes below, freely adapted from the Wikipedia pages about space-time and reference frame, may give a hint.

The Price of Private Funds Is Less Wrong

If Prof. Malkiel had taken his “Random Walk” in Midtown Manhattan, the private capital industry’s enclave, he could have found that prices can be “less wrong” there than down Wall Street – to a level that could offer, over the life of a private fund, reasonable arbitrage opportunities but not without risk.

Private Capital Beta: Theory Reloaded

In a recent Financial Analyst Journal article titled “Do (Some) University Endowments Earn Alpha?” the authors find that endowments mostly fail to deliver alpha and what looks as alpha can be almost totally explained by the inclusion of alternative investments in a static asset allocation. Digging further, the authors find that there is no strong statistical evidence of selection skill relating to the private equity and hedge fund portfolios.