One caveat that I wish to make at the beginning of this—very lengthy—entry. I am looking at technologies that can change the world in a non-incremental fashion, regardless of…

Perhaps the most significant transformation of the asset allocation space, as advocated by Berkelaar and practiced by a number of more sophisticated institutional investors, has been the recognition that the traditional model1of constructing a portfolio has several flaws: It fails to take into account the fact that expected returns, volatility, and asset correlations2are not necessarily constant over time.…

There are two main types distribution waterfalls in use today: The deal-by-deal (“American”) waterfall The whole fund (“European”) waterfall As the informal nomenclature would suggest, the deal-by-deal waterfall is most commonly used by American private equity sponsors, while the whole fund waterfall is used most comonly used in Europe and Asia.…

I first watched Leonard Nimoy on Star Trek, where he played the character that made him, in many ways, famous. I did not watch—until much later—the series. No, my introduction to Mr. Spock came through the movies. The “token alien” in the movies, he spoke to me, an alien in many strange lands.…

Now, I should emphasize that my familiarity with venture capital is somewhat less extensive than my familiarity with private equity, infrastructure and real estate. I have some familiarity with it, having followed the sector in the trade publications and by speaking with local venture capitalists, but it was not an…

At the behest of a friend, I’m setting out a number of observations about the private equity deals that occurred in 2014. Being January 29, 2015 when I finished writing this post, it is a little late, but I prefer to be as thorough as I can be…

First, we can see from Table 1 below a general increase—admittedly with year-to-year fluctuations—in the number of private…

So, what can we do? (Other than decide to abandon the Chinese market, a decision that seems analogous to a physician cutting off an arm to cure a hangnail.) The short answer: Become better at due diligence. It is by no means a sovereign remedy for all the things that…

First, let’s look at the private equity fundraising landscape in Asia. A number of well-known private equity firms raised successor funds, including CVC Capital Partners, The Carlyle Group, TPG Capital and Affinity Equity Partners. The success of these well-known sponsors follows the immense $6 billion Asian Fund II raised by Kolhberg, Kravis Roberts & Co.…

The practice certainly still seems very widespread and not just among private equity sponsors, if the data the Bloomberg article cites is true: Data gathered by Xtract Research show that 77 percent of all loan deals in the third quarter included provisions giving borrowers the ability to block individual lenders, up from 51 percent at the end of last year.…