The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 1,728 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Sandler: Michael Milken did not go to prison for insider trading or bond fraud
“And then as time passed, and some of the same lies kept getting repeated, you went to jail for insider trading, or you went to jail for fraud in the bond, none of which is true.”
Milken: Non-investment grade debt has outperformed higher-rated debt and equities
“Going back particularly to the work that I had done in the sixties, so we're 60 years later now, the rates of return have been significant and have exceeded higher rate of debt and often equity rates of return.”
Milken: 77% of US AI PhD Students Are Foreign-Born
“50% of every software engineer or scientist in Silicon Valley in the last 30 or 40 years was not born in the United States.
60% of many of our medical research not born in the United States.
77% of everyone in PhD programs in AI not born in the United States.”
Mauboussin: Magnificent Seven Economic Profit Exceeds Market Cap Share
“When you take a look at the economic profit, so return on capital, less cost capital spread times invested capital, the economic profit Of the Magnificent Seven, it's actually larger than their market cap representation.”
Heitzmann: Thousands of startups needing capital will fail by late 2024
“There's thousands of companies that are going to need capital between now and the end of 24. The investors at almost every stage have generally been hurt by the macroeconomic environment. The purse strings are pretty tight. But the amount of companies that may…”
Ou: Top-quartile sub-$1B buyout funds outperform top-quartile mega-funds
“The medium return of funds, let's say it's sub one billion is quite similar to the medium returns of funds, five billion above observable from the industry data, but the top 10, 20% performers in the sub one billion category generates meaningfully higher retur…”
Jackson: Multi-strategy pod shop investors keep only ~45% of gross returns
“We've seen the pass-through cost structure eat away at investor returns, so now I think on average the end investor is keeping around maybe 45% of the gross return”
Fleetcor's European EV charging business has better economics than fuel cards
“We can look at their business in Europe and we can see clearly that the economics on that are actually on par, in fact, better than their core combustible business.”
Ballou: PE Firms Are Typically Insulated from Portfolio Company Liabilities
“And then the third, and this is the part that interests me the most as a lawyer, is that private equity firms Typically are able to insulate themselves from liability. So if something goes wrong at a portfolio company, the private equity firm is rarely held le…”
Ballou: PE lobbying stalled and weakened surprise medical billing reform
“There's also a thousand smaller stories, for instance, lobbying around surprise medical billing, which was really crucial to some of the business models of the few private equity portfolio companies. They were successful installing legislation for a number of …”
Aitken: Investors will absorb all US Treasury bond issuance through 2025
“Who's going to buy all these bonds that the United States is selling in 2023, 20 24, 2025 with a rising budget deficit before the recession comes?
And my answer is everybody.
Everybody.
You give people the right incentive, the right coupon, they will buy it.”
Aitken: Fundamental investors account for only 5-10% of listed turnover
“And yet the facts are that if you and I, Ted, decide we're going to buy some listed asset today, well, we're going to be five to 10% of the turnover. Because the way the world works today is that the flow is dominated by the machines, and that's not a criticis…”
Monk: Sustainability and ESG factors correlate with faster portfolio recoveries
“So what we're learning, and the findings are still being developed on our team, is that it's these sustainability factors, these long-term factors, employee satisfaction, environmental footprint, things like that, that you would say, well, really good ESG tool…”
Sack: Middle-market private equity has never acquired businesses primarily with debt
“Private equity firms acquire businesses mostly using debt. Show me one of those. I would love some of that. That's never been the way it is in middle market private equity. Certainly not the way it is now.”
Kayden: Later-stage venture is most vulnerable to market correction
“We don't tend to like larger funds, and we don't like later stage investing, largely because we think that is an area that is sort of more correlated to the public markets, you know, and an arbitrage opportunity, and so at a period of Massive, great inflation.…”
Chelsea FC's forced auction excluded a significant portion of natural buyers
“The economic sanctions that the UK and the European India put off certain individuals directly led to one of those individuals, former owner Chelsea, having to put the team up for sale. So, situationally, for us, Chelsea was essentially a forced auction by a f…”
SoftBank threatened to fund Lyft if Uber rejected its investment offer
“And so it was negotiating a deal with SoftBank, who in classic SoftBank fashion was saying, either you take all of our money or we're going to go invest it in Lyft and kill you.”
Investment committees drag performance by hiring and firing managers at wrong times
“Because the record is very clear that investment committees tend to fire managers at the wrong time and to hire managers at the wrong time, creating a drag on investment results they could otherwise have had.”
Most active mutual funds underperform decades-long benchmarks, guaranteeing indexers top-quartile performance
“85 to 90% of actively managed mutual funds underperformed the benchmark they have sought to be. Not every year, but every decade, every 20 years, and if you want to be in the top half of the top quartile, all you have to do is index, and you'd be there.”
Leveraged Derivatives Used For Growth Targets Caused The UK Pension Crisis
“The other common way, as we've experienced in the UK, where the UK, of course, has gone through a meltdown because they were using derivatives. They were leveraging. So they were only using 50% of their assets levered To be hedged, and the other 50% still rema…”
Rees: Large Private Equity Fund Returns Defied the Conventional Scale Penalty
“While there was this prevailing wisdom that as firms got bigger, the returns would suffer the last several years. Was antithetical to that.”
Gave: 2022 diversified portfolio losses are larger than in 2008
“So actually the total capital losses this time around are bigger than they were in 2008. Cause in 2008, if you had a diversified portfolio, you took your licks on your equities, but your bonds came through.”
Duke: Institutional investors underperform random selling by 70 basis points
“When you look at their sell side decisions, they're usually about 70 bips worse than the benchmark.
So if you were to just randomly
Free the capital up from your portfolio.
How would you do?
That's the benchmark.
When you look at their actual decisions, and th…”
Stavros: C.H.I. Employee Ownership Paid $175K Average, Up to $1M
“So the end payouts ended up being 175,000 on average, and we had hourly workers and truck drivers make almost a million dollars.”
Garg: DeFi protocols like Maker and Aave did not fail in 2022
“DeFi worked. DeFi didn't fail here. Maker is still going. Frax is still going. Ethereum is producing blocks. You can send money around using stable coins. You can still take money out of Aave. All the systems that are designed to be over collateralized and res…”
The Bank of Japan's Yield Curve Control Peg Cannot Hold
“In fact, I think one of the best opportunities in the world, quite frankly, is in Japan, where they have the YCC program, where they have tenure rates pegged to 25 basis points, zero to 25. There's no way that's going to hold in this environment.”
Citrone: Shorting Long-End Japanese Debt Offers 50 to 75 Basis Points
“That's one of the best fixed income shorts in the world today. He may not make a hundred basis points, but it's 50 or 75 basis points to be made in the long end on the short side there, 10 years beyond.”
Veremis: Ethereum outperformed most crypto venture and hedge funds net of fees
“And in fact, Ted, if you look at how Ethereum performed over the past few years, it's beat most funds, net of fees.”
Xu: China's EV leaders will become global market leaders
“And we believe that when China become the largest country
For both manufacturing and consumption, and China's leader will become a global leader.
And we see that happening in the world of electronics manufacturing, in the world of cell phone, and it will happe…”
Average inflation will exceed pre-2020 decade levels for several years
“That over the next several years, average inflation would turn out to be higher than in at least the 10 years prior to say, twenty-twenty. That would be my best guess.”
Papic: China's household debt exceeds the US relative to disposable income
“So if you look at household debt as percent of disposable income in China, it's higher than that of the U.S.”
Wolfe: Venture Returns and LP Cash Distributions Will Slow or Turn Negative
“Eventually the great things that we've seen over the past few years, which are exceptional returns, not just unrealized, but realized and returned and distributed cash to LPs is going to either slow down or reverse and potentially be negative, which is somethi…”
Grinda: AngelList study proves high-volume qualified investing increases fund IRR
“AngelList did a study of all of their different mini funds on AngelList to see which ones were the most successful. And their ultimate conclusion was The more qualified deals, and of course we need to define what qualified means, you invest in, the higher your…”
Sternlicht: Desperate SPAC sponsors will cut promotes by 25% to 75%
“The outcome of this will be as the two year anniversary of those SPACs births comes around, they would get desperate and they will start cutting their promotes 25, 50, 75%, just so they don't lose the sponsor equity capital they put up. So it's going to be a b…”
Graña: Up To a Third of the MSCI EM Index Is State-Owned
“Between a quarter and a third of the benchmark are state-owned enterprises. Think Gazprom, Rosneft, PetroChina, ICBC, Petrobras. Most of these companies that I hope you can appreciate are governance challenged.”
Apollo and TPG transferred Caesars casinos to bankruptcy-remote entities
“Apollo and TPG executed a series of these complex asset deals, asset transfers, financial engineering, where more money is put in the business. They buy casinos from the existing Caesars and Harris Opgo, all in an attempt, ostensibly, to Keep everybody's inves…”
Caesars' B-7 loan eliminated its maintenance covenant and parent guarantee
“And they offered them very, very generous fees, among other things, to participate in this transaction that accomplishes three things. One, it's gonna give them some liquidity to refinance out some of their other debt. Two, it's going to remove the most onerou…”
OpCo stock buyers were debt holders benefiting from guarantee release
“And in fact, the hedge funds that bought the stock in Opco were all hedge funds who had debt positions, who were benefiting for the release of that guarantee.”
Caesars restructuring centered on fraudulent conveyance accusations over property transfers
“The mass tort in the case of Caesars is the accusation of fraudulent conveyance in these transactions where many of the top properties of the Caesars opco ended up in these affiliated entities where Apollo owned them, and they were out of the hands of Creditor…”
Examiner found $5B in potential claims against Caesars and PE executives
“Richard Davis, a former Watergate prosecutor, chosen as an examiner at the beginning of the case and gets deep access and interviews, you know, 75 different people who are designing and behind these transactions. Goes through millions of documents with a team …”
Fund performance quartiles remain exactly the same after GP stake sales
“Performance of the fund, and when we looked at this, we looked at private equity, credit, and real estate, and effectively, the proportion of top quartile, second quartile, et cetera, funds is the exact same before and after. I mean, there's a marginal shift. …”
Fund sizes and AUM do not accelerate after selling a GP stake
“On the AUM side, I was actually surprised to see that step ups and AUM growth didn't expand at the same rate that I thought it would. So step ups actually were the same, if not slightly lower after selling a stake.”
Grantham: China has 300,000 electric buses while the U.S. has 400
“They have 300,000 electric buses, and the U.S. Has 400.”
Grantham: Corporate interest coverage is well above historical averages
“When you look at interest rate coverage, you find that the entire corporate system is in pretty darn good shape, well above average.”
Milkman: Rigid routines harm exercise habit durability compared to flexible schedules
“We were startled to find that the rigidity was harmful. What we found is that that group, they went ever so slightly more often, they did sort of form a habit around going at that magic time, a little bit more often than the group that had had a more flexible …”
Ariely: The SHE Index systematically underperforms the S&P 500
“Yeah, so it does much worse. Systematically, repeatedly, by big gap.”