From The McKinsey Global Private Markets Review 2018 (subtitle: “The rise and rise of private markets”):
Your eyes do not deceive you. That is literally a rocket ship with stabilizer fins made of dollar bills, blasting off into the stratosphere. I like to imagine it’s headed off to join the crypto people and their lambos on the moon.
A few highlights from the introduction:
“Private asset managers raised a record sum of nearly $750 billion globally, extending the cycle that began eight years ago.”
“Within this tide of capital, one trend stands out: the surge of megafunds (of more than $5 billion), especially in the United States, and particularly in buyouts.”
“What was interesting in 2017, however, was how an already powerful trend accelerated, with raises for all buyout megafunds up over 90 percent year on year.”
“Investors’ motives for allocating to private markets remain the same, more or less: the potential for alpha, and for consistency at scale.”
This is what you see when an asset class gets frothy. And private equity is an asset class I have had my eye on for a while now. As I have written before, and as McKinsey says somewhat obliquely in their report, institutional investors have come to view private equity as a magical asset class.
We have seen this movie before. It happened with hedge funds in the early 2000s (spoiler alert: it ends with capital flooding into the space and diminished future returns). There are no magical assets. People ought to know better by now. I guess the allure is too powerful. Particularly for return-starved pension systems.
Anyway, when this thing turns there are going to be knock-on effects in a couple of other areas: namely high yield debt and leveraged loans. The gears of the private equity machine are greased with high yield debt. These days there is a strong bid for crappy paper. Especially crappy paper with floating rates.
The yield on the S&P/LSTA US Leveraged Loan 100 Index is something like 5%. Meanwhile, 2-year Treasuries yield 2.5%. And loan covenants suck, which means when defaults inevitably tick up recoveries are going to suck. Buyers are so fixated on interest rate risk they’re overlooking the credit component. You can keep your 250 bps of spread, thanks. Doesn’t seem like a great risk/reward proposition to me.
If I were a big institution, I would be swimming damn hard upstream against consensus on private equity.
If I were a financial advisor, I would steer clear of floating rate paper, rather than reach for a bit of yield so I can tell my clients they’re insulated from interest rate risk.
If I were a distressed debt investor I would make damn sure I had access to liquidity for when these deals start to explode (indeed, many distressed funds are out seeking commitments for exactly this purpose).
The institutional investors will screw it up, because they’re organizationally incapable of swimming upstream. Most of the financial advisors will screw it up, too, because they don’t really understand what they own in a bank loan fund and they tend to fixate on past performance data, which isn’t as relevant to the current environment. The distressed debt guys and gals will make a bunch of money for a few years picking through the shattered ruins of these deals. That, I admit, warms my heart. The distressed folks have had a rough go of it lately.
This whole dynamic is a great example of how investor psychology drives market cycles. To play off that tired old hockey analogy: investors don’t skate to where the puck is going, they skate toward the player who last handled the puck.
Here the puck is going to stressed/distressed debt.
It is most definitely not going to the moon.