New Sector Thesis Development

Any general tips / best practices to follow when trying to find sectors for your fund to invest in? I’m mostly focused on the sector identification process (and how to not end up just boiling the ocean). Realize banker/consultant/expert calls, looking at new deals, etc. will help but I want to build my knowledge base before starting those calls so I don’t come off as an absolute numbskull. Reading equity research, primers, sector newsletters might help but figured I’d ask the community to see if there’s anything else they would recommend. Thank you. 

10 Comments
 

The whole point of expert calls is to ask idiotic questions in a safe space. A 45 minute call with an expert is usually enough to get a solid basis for understanding the market structure, and can turbo charge your investigation of specific sub-elements of the overall value chain. Personally, I would recommend spending no more than 30 minutes figuring out relevant companies in the space, then getting an expert call set up and using that to develop a broad view of the market layout, then figure out the right rabbit holes from there.

 
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Gotcha. Then yeah, your best bet is probably going to be leveraging a few sources:

  • Public filings of any traded companies in the space
  • Reach out to any industry organizations and ask if they have good primer materials
  • See if you can establish direct connections with players in the space to serve as "river guides" (industry conference speaker lists are a good way to try and find people for this)
  • Get your banker friends to do some industry primers for you (only really worthwhile if they have significant experience in the space, and even then they usually get about half of it wrong)
  • Try to get your hands on equity research reports

For what it's worth, I wouldn't go nuts on this, but it's probably worth at least creating a few waves about your firm's expert call policy. The whole point of working in private equity is to come up with good ideas for industries and companies to invest in, and expert calls are an extremely valuable resource. Unless you're at a $100m fund, it's a bit crazy that you can't do any calls to build general industry knowledge.

 

A few other sources:

  • Consulting firm publications (Bain's Private Equity report, Bain's healthcare private equity reports, McK global market reports, etc.) - these can help spark some ideas and key themes, albeit unlikely anything groundbreaking
  • Sector newsletters and news outlets (e.g., Healthcare Dive)
  • Industry conferences (InsureTech, LegalTech, HLTH, HRTech, etc.) - if you can't attend or don't have time for the sessions, you could at least look at key themes for their panels and roundtables in their agenda/website
 

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