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 4,533 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
Seides: Surviving hedge funds almost always expand beyond initial products
“Almost every instance of a hedge fund lasting beyond its first generation has followed a business strategy that expanded beyond the manager's initial product offering.”
The AI content glut will force platforms to verify human users
“AI and the glut of AI-generated content is now going to make proof of humanity much, much more important for UGC websites, because it will be really, really important, not just to keep down spam, but because users presumably want to see what humans have to thi…”
Live sports will be the last human entertainment domain safe from AI
“Sports, sports will be the one last place for traditional entertainment where you are guaranteed to feel the humanity. No one will want to watch robots play basketball.”
Tannenbaum: Indian private markets returned 35 cents per dollar since 2000
“Of every dollar invested since 2000, something like 35 cents has come back, and I'm sure the industry will come good, but as I was sort of looking over the proverbial wall at other asset classes, it's not exactly apples to apples comparison, but for example, i…”
Tannenbaum: Net Foreign Allocator Flows to India Are Functionally Zero
“Net flows from foreign allocators are functionally zero to India.”
Tannenbaum: 80% of new power generating capacity in India is renewable
“In reality, 80% of new generating capacity in India is renewable.”
Amazon Will Ultimately Generate Over $100 Billion Annually in Ad Revenue
“Amazon's not going to be doing billions in advertising revenue. They're going to be doing tens of billions and ultimately over a hundred billion a year in ad revenue.”
Asness: Multi-manager pod shops probably cannot grow by another 5x
“I tend to think those shops probably can't grow by another factor of five. There's just a limit to alpha. There are limits how many great traders that are out there.”
Abell: Data shows almost zero correlation between buying cheap and PE returns
“You might say, well, buying cheap is better, but when you look at the actual data, you do a regression analysis, and so maybe you would expect to see it in the cheaper you bought, the return would be up and to the right. And what we really see is that, one, th…”
Amherst concentrates 50% of its assets in top 10 managers
“So we have less than 40 managers in the portfolio. Half of our assets are in our top 10 managers.”
Morehead: Venture capital industry in total has never lost money over 10-year period
“The industry in total over a 10 year period, I don't think has ever lost money. I'm not sure if I'm a hundred percent correct on it, but as close.”
Dixon: No top App Store apps were created in the last decade
“Go look at the top apps in the app store. And none of those services were created in the last 10 years.”
Dixon: Banning Open-Source AI Would Leave Five Companies In Control
“If it's banned, which I think some places seem to be moving towards, that will end up in a very different world. It'll end up in the world where you have five companies that control the technology and just a very different economic structure.”
Dawn predicts secondary market volume will hit $400B-$500B within five years
“So it would not surprise me if the GP side of this market is 200 to two hundred and fifty billion dollars in five years time. So if you add that onto what we think is a natural growth also, In the LP market, getting to four to five hundred billion is reasonabl…”
Masters: Acquisitive banks suffer from massive legacy tech debt and cost inflation
“All banks that have grown via acquisitions have legacy tech debt problems that are significant, and very often those derive from not taking the tough decisions sooner, and then you just create a sort of spaghetti junction, string and sellotape, hold the whole …”
Sandler: Milken pled to violations never previously criminally prosecuted
“We actually found things to plead to, none of which had ever been subject to criminal prosecution before, many of which hadn't probably even been enforced as regulatory violations before, but we found things that he could admit to.”
Sandler: Judge assessed market damage from Michael Milken's violations at zero
“Interesting enough, when the judge assessed the economic damage to the marketplace from everything Michael pled to, included on the three counts that related to Bosque, that the total economic effect of these violations was zero. Not one penny was lost.”
Sandler: Drexel collapsed after funding unsold inventory with commercial paper
“What had happened is, to prove they could still get deals done, they were taking a lot of securities that they couldn't sell into inventory, and they were financing it by issuing commercial paper in the commercial paper market. So in financial parlance, they w…”
Sandler: Milken received a 10-year sentence via consecutive two-year terms
“And she gave him a ten-year sentence, which number one, negated what we thought was a cap of five years. Because she gave him two years on five counts to Z serve consecutively, not concurrently.”
Sandler: Milken's sentencing judge told parole commission no further wrongdoing was proven
“The judge who sentenced Mike, who held the Fatico hearing, wrote a letter to the parole commission on Mike's behalf, indicating that she held the Fatico hearing, and she did not believe that any further wrongdoing other than what he pled to could be shown, eve…”
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: Historical bond data showed credit risk premiums exceeded actual default risk
“What everyone said about credit was wrong, and there was a book by Bradford Hittman on long-term Corporate bond and investor experience, and the riskiest credits were perceived as the best, and the best credits were perceived as the worst. Whether you were the…”
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: Over 50% of Economic Growth in Past 200 Years Stems From Public Health
“Most people don't realize when I'm there that the number one driver of economic growth in the last 200 years is public health and medical research, and so more than 50% of all economic growth can be attached to public health and medical research.”
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.”
Jacobs banned his Chief Customer Officer from operating reviews for a year
“I actually banned our chief customer officer from operating reviews for a year because he couldn't abide by the rules. He violated the rule of talking while someone else was talking.”
Arndt: Future Macro Regime Demands Less Reliance on Equities and Bonds
“When we look at the world going forward, we see more inflation, more volatility, probably wars, at least in localized places more frequently, deglobalization, more populist governments that will direct capital, all those things detract from economic growth, al…”
Housel: 50 Years of Indexing Beats 98% of Investors Net of Fees
“And I also know that if I can be an index fund investor for 50 years, I will probably end up in the top two percent of all investors who are doing this, particularly after fees, after taxes, transaction costs, top two percent.”
Tangen: Private equity market faces distress and will not improve soon
“Private equity companies are not having a good time. Fundraising is difficult. Exits are difficult. Financing is not easy. You have a lot of debt coming up to renewals. This market is not great. And I don't think it's going to be great for some time.”
Seides: The US economy cannot sustain private debt loans at 15%
“Fresh money opportunities in private debt are really interesting, because rates have gone up, and there's a dearth of capital, particularly in the middle market. The problem with that is that the economy can't sustain itself on loans at 15%. It just won't work…”
Seides: Future money management compensation won't match the last 20 years
“I don't think the remuneration for that in the future will be anything like it has been over the last 20 years.”
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…”
Martell: The next five years represent the opportunity of our careers
“It's definitely billions of dollars. I believe this is the opportunity of our careers.”
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”
Sebusch predicts many late-stage venture unicorns will become 'zombie corns'
“In the late area, there's a lot of unicorns that are going to be zombie corns, right? And that's part of our job of trying to ascertain and understand what those portfolio looks like.”
Corre: M&A Deal Flow Will Rebound as Regulators Back Off Extreme Positions
“I'm actually pretty optimistic now that the administration seems to be pivoting away from some of these more extreme positions. They basically folded on Activision. They folded on Horizon. I'm pretty optimistic that once the corporates get the message that it'…”
Lenders Pitch NAV Loans for Up to 50% of Portfolio Value
“I've already seen presentations from lenders offering NAV loans for up to 50% of a private equity portfolio value.”
Late-Cycle NAV Loans Bring Uncompensated Risk to LPs
“No matter how you look at it, NAV loans are a late-cycle response to the higher cost of debt and slowing fund flows that will bring uncompensated risk to LPs.”
Kuruvilla: Multi-stakeholder value-creating businesses outperform purely financial-focused companies long-term
“The thesis is that those types of businesses that are creating value for its stakeholders will outperform over the long haul in general, those businesses that are focusing only on one form of capital, i.e. Financial capital.”
Kuruvilla: Studies suggest values-driven investing yields 3% annualized alpha
“I think the best studies out there would suggest that there's somewhere in the neighborhood of three percent annualized alpha that the market hasn't captured while controlling for size and market cap and all the standard factors there that is to be harvested.”
Multi-strategy platforms will continue consolidating market share and trading talent
“But if you look at it over five, 10, 15, twenty-year periods, I think the secular trend is going to be sustained. So if you look at the market share in terms of investor dollars, or the market share even more so in terms of the alpha pie in the markets, or the…”
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.”
Sargent: Manager selection will drive more future endowment alpha than allocation
“My guess is if you fast forward, there's gonna be more of that from manager selection over time because so many people have just copied this asset allocation model.”
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: Without corporate veil reform, short-term thinking will increase
“So I think if we don't change that piercing the corporate veil issue, which it's not a question of capitalism or non-capitalism, it's really a question of in the weeds, how do we design our business system? I think we're going to have increasingly short-term t…”
Khajuria: Conservative internal risk management prevents systemic risk in private equity
“We're not seeing systemic problems with private equity. There are very few that go bust. And I think not just because of the corporate veil point, but I think also just the way their own risk management is set up. It's inherently very conservative.”