There was recently an article in Bloomberg called Robots Are Eating Money Managers' Lunch that discusses "esoteric" assets, or assets without established markets where you basically need to build a business as your investment in order to access. This includes things like charter school finance, factoring payments between various entities like the Italian government and a refugee camp, and basically anything else that is non-bid, non-flow, non-market, non-auction and non-existent to Wall Street.
One step below this on the illiquidity/unconventionality spectrum are "niche" or "unconventional" assets like aircraft leasing, movie rights, drug royalties, litigation finance. While the subject of the article, Rishi Ganti, draws a fine line between esoteric assets and niche assets (which have markets), there still seems to be a sizable liquidity gap between your stocks/bonds and niche assets.
Does anyone know of any private investment firms (probably within the private equity/private credit domain) that invests in a broad swath of these types of niche assets? What about esoteric assets?
Basically, an unconstrained money manager that has the latitude and wherewithal to invest in anything unconventional. What would you even call this business model because it's not confined to any one strategy but rather can execute on any number of unconventional strategies?
It's been tough to find anything of the sort except for some family offices (long term capital, no mark to market bullshit) and some generic "private market" arms of hedge funds (like Mr. Ganti's old group at Two Sigma).
