Prediction Not checkable as stated
Assaf: S&P 500 passive funds will likely lag good active managers over 5-10 years
“It probably won't do as well, relatively speaking, over the next five to 10 years as it did over the last five to 10 years relative to good active managers. We believe that. We'll see.”
Opinion
Assaf: Retail private equity aggregators will likely disappoint investors due to fees
“If it gets there through aggregating vehicles, there are shops that are in the business of making private equity and other alternatives accessible to a universe of clients that are smaller than ours. A good chunk of the returns that our clients will get from t…”
Insight
Assaf: Lower volatility produces higher dollar wealth when cash flows occur
“If there's cash flows along the way, I'm going to have more dollars than you will if I compounded with half the vol.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Assaf: Private market excess returns will likely diminish with increased competition
“And so, as the private market world becomes more and more accepted, we'll probably start to see the excess returns diminish.”
Insight
Assaf: Missing a manager's rebound hurts more than enduring mediocre returns
“And the pain, from our perspective, of them being right and us being gone is much more than the pain of six more months of it was mediocre.”
Insight
Assaf: Advisory firms cannot maintain real client relationships past 150 clients
“When you have a hundred clients or 80 clients or a 150 clients, you can have a relationship with them. When you have 1500 or 15,000 or a 150,000 or whatever, you can't.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Assaf: ICG left JPMorgan post-Bear merger over funds placement conflicts
“JPMorgan wanted us to stay. They were great too. But we figured out that because they have this massive funds placement business, that business had conflicts with ICG. And when we figured it out, I went to the compliance people and I called our lawyers and sai…”
Disclosure
Assaf: ICG focuses diligence on smaller investment managers to find edge
“They tend to be smaller than larger. They're not managing Hundreds of billions of dollars generally. So we spend way more of our time looking at smaller firms than we do at larger firms.”
Disclosure
Assaf: ICG mostly avoided investment-grade fixed income for 10-15 years
“Well, we haven't had long only investment grade fixed income in client portfolios for probably more than the last 10 years, maybe the last 10 or 15 years, and if we had it was really short duration, almost extended duration cash type stuff, but no traditional …”
Disclosure
Assaf: ICG refuses to re-up with private equity managers holding questionable marks
“Even if the results are good, if we're not comfortable with the way they mark their book, we just don't believe it, they're just basically faking it till they make it, and they do make it, so the results are good, there's a much less likely chance we're gonna …”
Disclosure
Assaf: ICG prefers sector-specialist private equity managers over generalists
“Our private equity managers tend to be more sector focused specialists like healthcare guys, or finance markets, or biotechnology that gets really complex and really requires sector expertise, not a jack of all trades.”
Disclosure
Assaf: ICG's capacity limit is defined by client count, not AUM
“We don't know what our capacity limit is, and we imagine our capacity limit Is more likely to be hit by the number of clients than the amount of dollars.”
Disclosure
Assaf: ICG Advisors manages $7B to $8B across 80 clients
“Eighty-ish clients.
Most of them are taxpayers.
A dozen are small and mid-sized institutions.
Museum, a hospital,
School, things like that, but mostly families or people.
I don't know what our AUM is, but it's probably between seven and eight billion, or appro…”
Disclosure
Assaf: ICG prepares to reintroduce fixed income after a decade-long absence
“We're just now starting to really consider beginning to add some of that asset class back into portfolios and are pretty close to done with the work we're doing to identify the managers we'll use to put that in place for some of our clients where it's an appro…”
