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.

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.

Coller’s IRR Card [More Subtly Fooled #2]

If there’s an iconic badge for private equity valuation this is probably Coller Capital’s IRR and compound interest “cheat sheet” Card.

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.

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.

Riding Private Markets’ S-Curves

As I write about interpreting and predicting private markets’ returns, for the readers who missed one of my previous posts, I confirm there is no misspelling in the headline, it’s an S.