Please, no political bets. The headline is absolutely not referring to the UK Prime Miniature. The 14-year Conservative Party mission to shrink public services, business investment, critical trading relationships, institutional integrity and individual standards of public behaviour is ending in electoral wipe-out. Time for new beginnings, even small ones. As I read about UK ‘global leadership’ (with China) in a potential 9,000 millionaires leaving the country before the end of this year, I’m thinking more about generational change and down-sizing shifts in wealth creation strategies. That might seem strange in a world of mega-trillion tech companies but wealth works across different types of assets and for different generations. First a couple of size observations.
An interesting chart this week from Private Equity/VC research data house, Pitchbook, showed smaller private equity(PE) funds outperformed bigger ones over a 10-year time horizon. In the best performing quartile of funds the performance gap was a whopping 6.7%. In real money terms, the returns of small funds were one third higher than the bigger funds. Here’s the chart:
Clearly, the challenge of earning high returns with massive pools of money runs into the problem of a smaller opportunity set. In other words, big funds can only deploy capital in bigger companies and miss out on opportunities with smaller (probably faster growing) companies. However, funds as they become bigger can also suffer from strategy “drift” as pressure to deploy capital forces funds into other sectors, geographies, vintages, styles etc. As a classic illustration of this challenge, look no further than the ARKK innovation fund managed by Cathie Wood. Back in 2021, a big winning bet on Tesla and other innovative companies by the ARKK fund attracted billions of investor dollars. However, since then, the fund has cratered in value by 59% while the funds which track the Nasdaq tech index are up 37%. Big can sometimes be painful. Of course, new strategies can help diversify risk for investors and five headlines caught my eye this week:
Blackrock Muscles Into Private Assets Market For Wealth Clients – Bloomberg
Andreessen Horowitz plans to launch a private equity fund – Fortune
Carlyle and KKR beat rivals to win $10bn Discover Financial loan portfolio – Financial Times
Private Credit Is Trouncing Private Equity So Far This Year – Wall Street Journal
Watford FC Sells Digital Equity Tokens – Techopedia
So, the giant manager of publicly listed assets is looking for private assets, the venture capital giant wants private equity, the private equity monsters are going for better returns in private credit (loans) and Elton John’s former club is looking for digital equity. Got all that? Probably not, but, if we think about Elton and the music business 20 years ago then you’re witnessing a similar generational shift in investment/wealth products. Investors, as individuals or as families, are increasingly looking to invest in private assets, not just publicly listed companies or funds. There is also an additional trend we should be watching. Private investors are now organising themselves in syndicates or family office structures and the latter segment is sitting on enormous pools of wealth. Try these for size:
*Family offices currently manage circa $10 trillion of investments. Compare that to the higher profile hedge fund industry which manages $6.5 trillion.
*There are currently 15,000 family offices operating and actively investing globally.
*Now, for the banger. In the next 20 years there will be a seismic transfer of wealth from “Baby Boomers” to the next generation. Current estimates of this generational wealth transfer exceed $80 trillion.
So, this investor base of family offices will have new principals and new ‘purpose’. Apart from asset growth , tax structuring, succession planning and philanthropy, it is increasingly likely these investors will be ‘values driven’, and possibly less interested in the buy-and-sell 5-year cycles of private equity and venture capital funds. In this writer’s view, a massive pool of patient purposeful capital is poised to disrupt the traditional way companies are funded. And, for smaller companies and smaller investors this should be considered a win without any need for Gambling Commission scrutiny…..
