The Private Debt Pie
View PDF As institutional investors consider adding private debt to their portfolios, Callan’s Jay Kloepfer, executive vice president and the director of Capital Markets Research, prepared answers to some high-level questions about the characteristics and implementation considerations for private debt investing. In the paper he wrote, “The Private Debt Pie: Do You Want a Slice? […]
Latest on the Private Markets
View PDF The private equity markets kept up their robust pace of fundraising in the second quarter. Buyouts continue to be the top strategy for limited partners, receiving more than 70% of commitments. Among the quarter’s other highlights: The share of money flowing to venture capital investments squeaked to double digits in the second quarter […]
Private Equity Survey (2017)
View PDF Callan conducted a survey of institutional private equity investors to offer insights relevant to the limited partner community. We focused on deployment models, patterns of investment and commitment activities over time, governance and oversight, staffing and resources, and responsibilities for program administration functions. Our Private Equity Survey included 69 institutional investors with $1.2 trillion of […]
Jan Mende in Pensions and Investments: Infrastructure
Callan’s Jan Mende recently appeared in the Pensions and Investments roundtable feature, “What Does the Future Hold for Infrastructure Investing?” covering a wide-ranging set of topics of interest to infrastructure investors.
A Small Bounceback for Real Estate
View PDF The NCREIF Property Index advanced 1.8% during the second quarter (1.2% from income and 0.6% from appreciation). This marked the 34th consecutive quarter of positive returns for the Index. Appreciation return increased from the previous quarter, the first such gain since the first quarter of 2015. Industrial (+3.1%) was the best-performing sector for […]
As the World Churns, Despacito
View PDF Stock lovers embraced the slowly shifting narrative of global growth in the second quarter. Although hopes of a Trump bump faded further in the U.S. amid distracting Beltway theatrics, U.S. corporate profits remained resilient and credit spreads tightened modestly. Exhibiting little evidence of angst, the S&P 500 Index gained 3.1% while the Bloomberg […]
Strong Start for Private Equity
View PDF The private equity market got off to a roaring start in the first quarter of 2017, with new commitments up sharply compared to last year. Here are some highlights from Callan’s Spring Private Markets Trends newsletter: Fundraising New private equity partnership commitments totaled $80.0 billion, with 310 new partnerships formed, according to Private […]
The Rewards of Private Equity’s ‘Unrewarded’ Risks
For many portfolios and asset allocation studies, private equity plays a starring role because it boasts high projected returns and low enough expected correlations that mathematical models such as mean variance optimization love it. But private equity is not magic. The reality is that valuation smoothing, company-size tilts, comparatively longer investment and holding periods, and […]
Bear Market Ahead? Beware of the ‘False Charge’
View PDF When I was a Boy Scout backpacking in the Sierras, my troop assigned shifts of scouts at night to watch for marauding bears on the perimeter. To scare them off, the sentry clanged a pot or made some raucous noise. That simple response seemed to work fine—the fourfooted opportunist, however hungry, usually got […]
Dollops of Alpha with Beta
Behold the power of positive thinking. The U.S. economy moved steadily forward with revived animal spirits in the first quarter. That provided the Fed the ammunition to raise short-term rates by 25 basis points, with more increases expected in the rest of 2017. In the euro zone, tangible evidence of growth and inflation emerged, while […]