cattlecapital
2.6K posts

cattlecapital
@CattleCapital
capital deployment and curiosity. compiling for myself, scroll at your own risk




Soviet-style blocks in New York City? The red-brick towers of Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village are post-WWII modernist designs, created to tackle the housing crisis.





BREAKING: UBS canceled a round of junior layoffs because too many analysts and associates quit after bonuses were paid out. The firm reached its headcount target thanks to voluntary resignations. Reportedly most of the strong analyst/associates left while weaker ones stayed.









Apollo's John Zito on private equity: "I literally think all the marks are wrong...This next cycle is going to be a big moment in time for the private markets because people are way smarter than I think private-market participants, particularly people in the wealth channel. Like, I kind of sense an arrogance of the people who grew up in the private-markets business . . . If you don’t mark your book, I think you actually lose trust with the clients." As I dissected in my report on the "Retailization of Private Markets" (sageroadresearch.com/collections/re…), it's dumbfounding how much enthusiasm for PE over the past decade+ was predicated on nakedly absurd performance assumptions. In an article in May, the FT dissected IRR claims made by both KKR and Apollo in 10-K filings. First, they quoted KKR: “From our inception in 1976 through December 31, 2024, our Private Equity and Real Assets investment funds with at least 24 months of investment activity generated a cumulative gross IRR of 25.5%, compared to the 12.2% and 9.5% gross IRR achieved by the S&P 500 Index and MSCI World Index, respectively, over the same period.” As for Apollo, it claims a 39% gross IRR generated by its private equity funds from inception through year-end 2024. The FT contextualized these numbers: "Across almost all regulatory and marketing material filed by private equity, awe-inspiring IRRs are common. Apparently, these private equity firms have managed to defy the laws of mathematics, economics—and reality. Since most people typically don’t have a good grasp of compounding, it might be helpful to express these numbers in dollars to show how fantastical they really are. If KKR’s first $31 million fund from 1976 had compounded at 26% a year it would be worth $2.6 trillion today. Add in its second $350 million fund and you get $13 trillion—more than the global PE market. Apollo’s first funds would now be worth $74 trillion, just shy of global GDP." Private credit problems could easily spill over into PE and finally force a reckoning with the "laws of mathematics, economics—and reality." To again quote Zito: “There’s . . . unlimited demand for secondary private equity but they are worried about private credit which finances 80% of those portfolios . . . I can’t compute, but I’m the dumb guy. I don’t understand. I start saying this and I get these blank stares back at me like OK, I don’t know.” This is a particularly acute concern for the broader US economy given the PE creep into small businesses over the past decade (chart below). Learn more about Sage Road Research: sageroadresearch.com. Interested in subscribing? Message me. WSJ interview with Zito: wsj.com/finance/invest… Chart source: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

















