Transcript
A (0:00)
So, Alex, you have one of the
B (0:01)
most prolific career backgrounds of any guests. Having been at Morgan Creek, J.P. morgan, Cleveland Clinic, and most recently CIO of Aberdeen Investments Ireland. You have a deeper pulse on the LP community than almost anybody that I know. Give me a sense for the biggest issues facing LPs today.
C (0:19)
Pensions, endowments, foundations, family offices, outsourced CIO firms, consultant firms. You know, we talk to a lot of allocators and we try to listen to them about what they're interested and what they're worried about. And three big ones that have been coming up, two that we hear about a lot and one that we ask about a lot. The two that we hear about a lot are the lack of distributions and the changing nature of distributions from private asset funds. Something that's really accelerated in the last. It's been happening for the last 10 years, but really the last five years. The second one is the absolute meteoric rise of AI tools generally. And then specifically for allocators and investors, people who are assessing markets and funds, how can they use AI tools? And are AI tools going to replace us as investment professionals? And then the third one, factor model assessment of how their individual funds are doing and how they can assess. Importantly, the most important question in any fund evaluation process, am I paying alpha fees for beta performance?
B (1:25)
Do you want to get into whether AI tools are going to replace the two of us as well as factor analysis? But first, let's start on the DPI question. Maybe set some context for where DPI was in 2024 and 2025 versus historically.
C (1:39)
So that would be distribution as a percent of NAV. So that gives you distribution yield. So distribution yield for the portfolio for private assets has hovered very strongly at 2025%. This is data from MSCI Burgess. So Burgess put out this study that pointed out, yes, this distribution yield has historically hovered at around 25% or so.
B (2:00)
So you invest $100 million, you're getting 25% of the invested amount on average, on a yearly basis.
C (2:06)
The distribution yield reflects the distributions that you're getting on an annual basis as a percent of the private asset NAV. For the last four years, that distribution yield, instead of averaging 25%, has averaged 12. And the lowest it's been in the last four years has been 9%. And that is incredibly important because what that means is that the models upon which deterministically allocators have used to evaluate their expectations of the size of the private portfolio relative to the public and how much they need to commit in private assets each year to maintain that exposure. Instead, what's happening is that private assets are getting to become a larger and larger and larger portion of the total portfolio. The university endowment, the foundation, the pension, they still need the distributions from that pool of assets. And so the only thing the allocator can do then is to sell the liquid assets, which have been performing well. So what happens is you get this denominator effect where the private assets become a larger and larger pool because you have to sell the public assets. And so in 2021 and in early 2022, we saw this huge kind of outlay of private equity funds or firms being sold to either strategic or financial sponsors. There was a tiny little explosion of some IPOs that happened that had been kind of held up because of COVID 19. But then once we got past that, I wanted to share with you a critical number that we're seeing. So vintage 2020 and vintage 2021 funds, half of them, about half, 45%, have a DPI of less than 0.1, 0.1x.
