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 4,524 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 112 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
Pfeffer predicts most native utility crypto tokens will eventually go to zero.
“They wouldn't just stop using it, but they might switch to a fee model where basically you're paying miners to maintain the network, but maybe you're paying them in digital fiat or a store value protocol that might be Bitcoin or something else. So I think that…”
Dunn: Wake Forest trustees voted to hire Bernie Madoff in blind test
“So I gave them this big Wilshire book of 400 pages. It had this strategy, and I said, this is the kind of book that you typically get from a consultant. And it was a manager that was on the board of NASDAQ, and he was doing this and that. Eight billion dollars…”
DeLong: Hundreds of PE Partners Leave Feeling Hollow Despite Earning Millions
“There are some private equity firms, and I've known hundreds of partners, and all of them leave feeling hollow with truckloads of money.”
DeLong: Asset Management Is 50 Years Away From Authentic Feedback Culture
“I think that the asset management world is 50 years from that.”
Csicsko: Public equities have vastly outperformed broad private markets recently
“You pair that with a public market that's vastly outperformed, the broad private market measured on, say, a Cambridge index level, and it's causing most people I know to have very difficult conversations around what is the future path of private allocation in …”
Jain: Nvidia invested in over 50 of its own customers recently
“NVIDIA invests in over 50 plus of their customers in the last six, nine months.”
Jain: Altria outperformed Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon over the past five years
“Cigarette volume has been declining at seven, eight percent in US. And guess what, last five years? Altria has outperformed Mera. I think now Microsoft and Amazon last five years.”
Jain: Exxon generates $50B cash flow vs AMD's $9B at comparable valuations
“Exxon is almost similar market cap as AMD. Depending on the oil prices, this year they generate probably fifty billion of clean free cash flow. AMD will be lucky if they generate nine.”
Jain: SpaceX generates $18B in revenue but loses $5B
“SpaceX is wonderful, but eighteen billion revenue and five billion loss.”
Kim: Junior IR professionals out-earn deal peers; IR partners earn less
“So what's kind of interesting is that the younger you are in their career, actually the more money you make relative to your peers because the younger professional gets to do some of the selling. Occasionally actually gets to advise the GP because you're trave…”
Liquidity Constraints Will Trigger Indiscriminate Selling Across Private Credit Markets
“There will be indiscriminate selling in private credit. There's good reasons why many of those companies will be sold, but there'll be many reasons where it's just liquidity that's driving prices down.”
Public BDCs show massive valuation discrepancies on identical syndicated club loans
“There's some obvious ones where you see, let's just say public BDCs that own the same club deal, the same loan. One BDC versus another, or two or three versus a fourth BDC, there's a massive variance, in a second lien especially, where you're like, wait, the f…”
Certain private credit loans drop from par to zero in one quarter
“Then you have micro situations where loans are getting marked from hundred to zero in one quarter.”
The software sector will experience a coming wave of debt defaults
“We're going to have a wave of defaults in the software space.”
Private credit BDCs are mislabeling industry concentrations in their loan portfolios
“Literally putting in every loan into Claude or ChatGBT to figure out what do they think it is. There has been some mislabeling of concentrations.”
Grantham: Every Two-Sigma Asset Bubble Historically Reverted to Pre-Bubble Trends
“In major countries, there was no exception to the principle that an overpriced market at two sigma, which is just a statistical measure. If you look at the price, you look at the breakout on the upside. If it's two sigma, there is no exception to the rule that…”
Grantham: AI CapEx is larger than any peacetime program in history
“AI Moving at warp speed, involving a greater CapEx program than has ever happened before outside of war.”
Grantham: Future markets might tax stocks to fund human price discovery
“In the end, you have to have some price work. You have to find a way of paying a few thousand good analysts to help price the equities, and I don't know how they will work it out. It's over my pay grade, but one day in the distant future, there might be a very…”
Grantham: Green Venture Capital Faces Two to Three More Bad Years
“And a lot more will fail, probably, given the level of help from the administration. I would think we're good for at least another two or three bad years.”
Grantham: Greenspan, Summers, and Levitt Blocked CFTC Subprime Regulation
“Greenspan and Summers and Levitt of the SEC waged war against the CFTC doing its job of regulating subprime instruments. They each, in turn, called up Brooksley Bourne, who was the boss, a lady of iron nerve and principle. They harangued her, saying, what are …”
Executive Hires Placed by VCs Have an Average Tenure Under 18 Months
“You look at the data of executive hires placed by a venture firm. Either an investor said, like, oh, you got to hire this guy. He's going to come in and totally change your go-to-market. This guy's going to blow revenue out of the water. Or it's through a tale…”
Baker: AI Is in Year Three of a 20- to 30-Year Cycle
“We're, I think, in the very early days of AI. If ChatGPT is to AI as Netscape Navigator was, we're in year three of what should be a 20, 25, thirty-year really exciting cycle or trend.”
Grefenstette: 80% of founders pitching a16z use cheap open-source Chinese LLMs
“I think Andreessen came out recently and said, 80% of the founders that come to them are using open source Chinese LLMs, because it might be 70, 80% as effective, efficient, but it's a 10th the cost.”
Warrington: The era of creating $200B venture-backed companies in China is over
“Those days are over in the sense of there's a lot of things telling you that there's not really going to be the next two hundred billion dollar company, or at least it's harder to get there.”
Bobby Jain: Multi-manager hedge funds are effectively bank prop desks
“The multi-managed industry was the prop desks. It's not that different. The culture shock of moving from CS to Millennium was not that high at all. It was the same thing. A lot of it was the same people, as there was a transfer of people from the prop desks to…”
Gilmore: A simple stock-bond mix closely tracks most complex pension portfolios
“You can take a simple combination of equities and bonds, and it will track the actual portfolio very closely. And that'll be the case for most pension funds.”
Gilmore: National security concerns make government capital controls quite possible
“One thing that I wouldn't like to see would be forms of capital controls, but that's quite possible.”
O'Connor: Deglobalization and sticky inflation are highly bullish for natural resources
“We're in a world with high for longer sticky inflation, certainly a breakdown of the free trade agreements that were happening so easily. Previously, there's a lot of re-onshoring. Unfortunately, we've seen the best of the geopolitical environment from securit…”
Lewinsohn: Chinese expansion will drive severe chemical market overcapacity by 2030
“If you look at the amount of ethylene and propylene that they're bringing on, and then go to 20 30 and shut all of the European and Japanese capacity, in 2030, you'd have more over capacity than you have now.”
Lewinsohn: Private asset-backed risks will hurt specific funds, not the global economy
“I don't think that it would create systemic problems. Just like every hedge fund in the world wants to call a recession constantly because they're desperate for the volatility. Everyone wants to constantly say, what's the next systemic thing? Because the impac…”
Kleinman: Asset management will stop segmenting by public versus private in 5-10 years
“And the way you cut the asset management industry in five or 10 years, I'm not sure is going to be based on public and private. It'll be based on other risk categories, but that's not a good definition of what's risky and what's not risky anymore. I think you'…”
Kleinman: Weak AI ROIs will weigh on markets and hit levered players
“If those ROIs don't come to pass, I don't think the whole system is going bankrupt, but that clearly will have a weighing effect on the markets. Certainly the biggest hyperscalers will be okay, but that cascades down to many, many players, some of whom have go…”
Kleinman: AI CapEx represents at least 2% of GDP growth
“That's representing at least a couple percent of GDP growth right now. That's driving massive investment in infrastructure and chip manufacturing and energy and all of these things.”
Kleinman: Mutual Funds and ETFs Will Blend Private Assets into Products
“Traditional asset managers, i.e. Mutual funds, ETFs, they're gonna start injecting some amount of private assets blended into their products.”
Monk: Investment Professionals Will Become Co-Pilots to AI
“The human beings in these organizations will become the co-pilot to the AI, rather than the AI being the co-pilot to the human beings, because they're gonna have all the data, and they're gonna have that customization available.”
Monk: UC Investments' Jagdeep Bachher Is Attempting to Buy College Leagues
“Our friend Jag Deep is trying to buy college leagues.”
Over 80% of Capital Group equity strategies beat their benchmarks post-fees
“If you look at our equity strategies since inception, over 80% of them have beaten the market after fees.”
Seides: Private Equity Exit Recovery Is Two to Four Years Away
“I continue to think this takes several years. Maybe it's two, three, four years away. It's a question of how long does it take for that bid-ask spread to narrow?”
Seides: Private Credit Structures Prevent a Bank-Like Systemic Calamity
“I do not think there's going to be some calamity. The structure that the asset managers are using is just much better than what the banks used to use. You know, borrow short, lend long. So these are very long dated structures, which is great. You can work thro…”
Seides: Massive Inflows Will Compress Private Credit Returns to Roughly 6%
“Where I think there is a challenge is when all this money comes in, the one thing it does for sure is compress spreads. I don't think the people buying in the wealth channel have the right understanding of what returns they should expect. There was a pocket of…”
Seides: Unlocked Private Market Capital Will Flow Back Into Public Equities
“The biggest impact of that over the next couple of years is that when private markets unlock for liquidity, the first wave of that money from the institutional market is going to go back to the public markets. It's not going to get recycled in the private mark…”
Sacerdote: Cloud Computing Has Another 5 to 10 Years of Growth
“We have another five Maybe even 10 years to go on this, and it's still growing.”
Sacerdote: AI infrastructure is only 14% penetrated on the S-curve
“We're only about 14% penetrated on the AIS curve for infrastructure. Within the cloud, it's only three or four percent.”
Sacerdote: Inference-time reasoning will be adopted by all AI models
“And now deep seek is basically solidifying this inference time reasoning is going to be adopted by all the models.”
Sacerdote: AI Adoption Has Driven $50B to $70B in Extra Sales for Meta
“And we think that's driven fifties to seventy billion of extra sales to Meta by adopting AI.”
Wolfe: At least 50% of subscale VC funds will go out of business
“The long tail of funds that are subscale, I have predicted that you would see a 50% involuntary exit or extinction rate, that they would go out of business, and why? Because they're under-reserved, they've over-invested, they have too many portfolio companies,…”