Would you ever put 100% of your personal assets into private equity?

Assume you are an eldery fella at 45, have realized some carry, etc.

Now you have ~$10m to invest and you work at a firm with a bunch of various PE products + have access to a few other funds through friends etc.

Would you ever invest in public stonkz if you have access to PE funds at a discounted rate?

It's not like you really need the liquidity and the long term gains are quite a bit better...especially with the discount factored in?

Assuming you get no-fee investing ops in your own funds...it's actually very hard to lose money on privates VS public. And you probably dont need the liquidity if you're making $$$ in base salary + have a non-spendy lifestyle?

34 Comments
 

Diversification is important

But wondering, how much of a discount do you find these days in pe funds and is that typical? 

 

I didn’t know co-invest purchases were at a discount. Also, can people invest any amount to coinvest or is there a limit? 

 

Diversification is as important as the efficient market hypothesis is accurate. What's important is being right.

"If you don't have any enemies in life you have never stood up for anything" - Winston Churchill | "It's a testament to the sheer belligerence of the profession that people would rather argue about the 'risk-adjusted returns' of using inferior tooth cleaning methods." - kellycriterion
 
Controversial

I am 32, and have all of my money tied up in our partners fund and co-invest. Recently requesting my cash bonus be converted to GP Equity, and have began trying to purchase shares of the management company.

It is a boom or bust play, but I have a fallback, wealthy parents who have about a ~5.5mm dynasty trust that will go to me. I figure I can be risky because I have a fallback if my fund was to dry up, but if I didn't have that I would be way more diversified. 

 

Nothing would happen to my investments in the partners funds, GP equity and co invest, I would lose access the capital call leverage, so I would need to front more at each call. I also would need to pay a 1% per year Admin fee. Basically for them doing all stuff that is fund expenses the middle office accounting, tax stuff.

My carry in the current fund set. Nothing happens to it, but obviously I would lose carry on go forward funds

 

I would be absolutely willing to put the full amount I have to invest in private equity funds I manage. Obviously how specifically this breaks down depends on the funds that are available to me but I am entirely comfortable chasing yield. But I am also in my 20s. I would imagine I would have more hesitancy in my 40s but yeah. Putting my money back into the fund in significant chunks is something I’d expect to be comfortable with

 

As a secondary investor, a lot of my deals are with individuals who put all their money into illiquid assets and need to now collateralize their positions to generate cashflow. It is never good to not keep a small portion of your portfolio liquid - life happens and getting access to cash quickly and without a discount is helpful.

 
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"Operational improvements/gains in efficiency" is a way smaller share of PE's outperformance than you think when compared to expansion (organic or inorganic) via cheap credit (low rates in recent history) which again is another way of saying it's levered small cap value

 

Invest in secondaries. Heard some stat a couple years ago on how basically less than 1% of secondaries funds do sub 1.0x moic or something (or could’ve been a different metric, I forgot) 

 

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