The Ledger
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Nesbitt: Institutional consulting is an undifferentiated, zero-growth industry
“The consulting business, in a sense, from a business perspective, has gotten very concentrated and virtually zero growth, where you probably have five, maybe 10, but not much more than that, really sharing the pie amongst themselves. Sometimes it seems to be a…”
Nesbitt: RIA channel was historically targeted with substandard, high-fee products
“Sales into that channel were product pitches and substandard products, with high fees.”
Nesbitt: Asset classes cannot gain institutional adoption without benchmark indices
“It's not going to take off until it has an index. I often say it's in the Wizard of Oz, the scarecrow. He wants to be recognized as smart. He is smart, but Wizard says, all you need is a diploma. And then everybody will think you're smart. I've discovered in t…”
Nesbitt: Cliffwater flagship fund exceeds $20B, offering $1B quarterly repurchase
“Our flagship fund is over twenty billion dollars, so a billion dollars will offer repurchase. We have to have liquidity to meet that potential of a billion dollars, and so we don't want to hold cash, because cash is a drag, People are paying us to hold private…”
Nesbitt: Cliffwater was founded because 60/40 could not hit actuarial targets
“Going into the new century, I was convinced that it was going to be alternative investments, that no way, sixty-forty was going to meet the actuarial rate. My feeling was in alternatives, we could add three percentage points net, shift up the efficient frontie…”
Nesbitt: Cliffwater interval fund met all redemptions except one COVID quarter
“The only thing that's restrictive is getting out. So you can only get out once a quarter, generally a fund level gate of five percent. But for us, except for one quarter during COVID, anybody who wanted to get out on any quarter could get out.”
Nesbitt: Cliffwater seeded its PE interval fund by acquiring an insurance fund
“I will say, on the private equity, we didn't launch from zero, just cash. We negotiated with a large insurance company that had a private fund, and we bought that private fund, flipped it to an interval fund, and on we went.”