It seems that L/S hedge funds are relatively straight forward with their AUM figure, and fees are collected on the entirety of the company's assets. Is this also the case for alternative investment managers? Blackstone claims that it has 900 billion AUM. However, many of its funds, such as private equity and real estate, have a specific vintage of 5-7 years. After a certain point, they return capital to investors. Does this AUM include money from past fund raises that has already returned to investors, or is it only currently managed capital? Their revenue is at the $10 billion ball park, which implies a 1% yield considering all of its assets. This doesn't really check out intuitively. Am I misunderstanding something? Curious to see how Blackstone and its peers calculate AUM.
Another point: is it capital committed by LPs or just capital that has been called?
How much assets are under their management
Dang, you could have at least made a funny joke
Believe it's current total committed capital. Does not include prior, fully harvested funds on which they're no longer generating fees. Keep in mind a lot of their AUM is insurance company balance sheet money which isn't paying 2 and 20!
Piggybacking this, that's why the math doesn't work from a fee perspective as a large % of AUM does not pay the traditional 2/20. The reason all of this mega funds want HNW capital is it will pay the highest fees (because they have no choice at $250k commitment size) and going through banks is an easy $500mm+ fundraise with "1 LP" that pays max fees.
Why and how do the fees from High Net Worth individuals differ from traditional pension funds/endowments/SWF?
Yes, although plenty of firms use AUM and "capital raised since inception" pretty interchangeably. I agree that AUM should be only current total committed capital but firms love to inflate this number by including committed capital from fully harvested funds.
Agree, but the large publicly traded alts managers like BX aren't and usually firms will say "cumulative committed capital" or "aggregate committed capital" or "committed capital since inception" or something like that
What gets tricky is once deals are realized and capital is returned, I'd guess a lot of (not publicly-listed) firms don't update their AUM to be net of returned capital
Also some funds include debt in AUM. Like Apollo will include the total assets of their BDCs as AUM (because they're getting a fee on those assets) but likely funds a lot of the balance sheet with various forms of debt, some of which may or may not be funded by "Apollo's investors"
So it's kind of situation-dependent
What is the typical expected yield for insurance float?
I find that the exact metric used varies by firm depending on what looks best. Most non-MF PE firms I’ve seen quote cumulative capital commitments, which includes all funds raised plus all co-investments and any pre-fund deal capital. Whatever gets you the biggest number is usually the play.
Interesting cause the difference between total committed capital since inception and actually AUM currently under management can be orders of magnitudes off. What’s the best way to standardize this when evaluating alternative investment companies?
I know of some PE firms classifying AuM as the full TEVs of the businesses they investeded in. For example, $500m equity check in a $1.2bn TEV business. That $1.2bn will be classified as AuM, given that's the asset base the GP is managing to generate returns for the LPs. They'd typically state the total committed capital separately as well.
This way of calculating makes sense if you're only doing majority/control buyouts. Once you start doing minorities and alternative structures, it becomes a black hole. Think about owning 20% of the equity of the aforementioned $1.2bn TEV business. It would be a push to classify this as AuM IMHO
By the same token, would L/S list their AUM as AUM + debt used when trading on margin?
I am not aware if they actually do it, but intuitively it makes sense, considering that their invested exposure incl the leverage. However with L/S, the invested capital is a v flux element, considering they enter and exit investments in a heartbeat, so from that perspective don’t think their reported AuM is based on the above. For PE, it’s more meaningful given your tied longer to an investment (3-5-7 yrs)
Some firms now also market fee-paying AUM. This is usually a smaller number than total AUM, which can include LP co-invest, investments marked up, etc.
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