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. Continue reading
Investing
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
Fooled by IRRs (Yale, Schwarzman’s Cases)
“Everyone loves an optical illusion, except when it comes to financial results (1)”. Yet the private markets are not immune from optical illusion risks. Continue reading
Fair Value, DaRC Transparency
A recent article from the Private Equity Manager’s Daily Digest titled “When is fair value not fair value?” provides interesting and sharable comments about the decision taken by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) to create a task force and deliver more granular rules for “valuing hard-to-price non-quoted companies”. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
