Commentary

Letter from Stockholm

Our recent visit to Sweden was the 12th country in our 2023 global private credit tour meeting clients and prospects. The Nordic region has always been strong in terms of investor interest and commitment to alternatives. Amid higher rates, that appetite has sharpened, as our colleagues at Arcmont (and Nuveen for real estate and green…

Davos at the Delamar

As master of ceremonies at last week’s Greenwich Economic Forum, your correspondent had a ring-side seat at the event’s sixth annual gathering at the Delamar Hotel in Greenwich, CT. The list of speakers read like a Who’s Who of Nobel-prize winning thought-leaders in business, economics, and investments. It was hard not to be overwhelmed by…

All About Secondaries (Last of a Series)

At a recent private markets conference in Paris, Blackstone’s CEO Stephen Schwarzman said private equity “has just been too successful. Institutions have made so much money that all of a sudden they’ve exceeded their expected exposure.” As a result, cash-constrained investors are looking to the secondary market to sell some of their exposure. But has…

All About Secondaries (Fourth of a Series)

Last week in our special series on private equity secondaries, we discussed how GPs are leveraging newly developed liquidity in that market to manage funds and assist their LPs with their specialized investment needs. Given today’s challenged capital markets it’s also tougher to extract expected values from your best properties.  Sponsors are looking inwards and…

All About Secondaries (Third of a Series)

Our head of secondaries, Nick Lawler, relates the following story: “In April 2019, I was in the middle of a road-trip from Chicago to Louisville, when I got a call from one of our relationships at a major investment bank to discuss a new deal. The sponsor, one of the nation’s largest and most respected, was…

All About Secondaries (Second of a Series)

Over the past two decades, the private equity secondaries market has quietly expanded into one of the highest growth, yet still niche, areas of alternative investments. From 2002 to 2022, global secondary market volume scaled from $2 billion to over $100 billion in transaction value – a 50x growth rate. GP-led transactions now account for…

All About Secondaries (First of a Series)

“The majority of GPs have observed some level of interest from their investors for continuation funds.” – Private Equity International Private Fund Leaders Survey 2023. Besides the above survey, an article last month in Secondaries Investor cited Jefferies data showing 80% of LPs sought liquidity by selling into continuation vehicles. This is an extraordinary shift…

A Word About Bonds

”The bond market is the most important market in the world. It is the backbone of all other markets.” – Ray Dalio, founder, Bridgewater. A recent Financial Time piece on bonds [link] reminded us of their long, proud history as well as their critical importance to the proper functioning of today’s global markets. The article…

The Market Now

Our last Market Now series came in March 2022 [link] after Covid had peaked and begun to fade, when Russia invaded Ukraine. This week we think another pause to review conditions is appropriate given a number of dynamics at play. First, the Fed has paused in its rate hikes as their gravity seems to have…

The Case for Junior Capital (Last of Four Parts)

In early 2020, just before Covid came crashing down on our heads, we were in the middle of a Lead Left series called “Ten Top Myths About Private Credit”. Myth #5, published on February 20, was “No one uses mezzanine debt anymore.” We felt compelled, after a decade of increasingly aggressive senior and unitranche financings,…