PE4FAMs Blog

The European refugee crisis reminds us that a small disruption with frightening end game consequences (death, cultural cleansing and slavery) can set in motion larger trends with equally horrifying consequences. The European refugee exodus will impact neighbors for the rest of this decade. So, too, are the economic effects of the war against coal. Some […]

When I was a boy and an avid reader of Superman Comics there was an occasional Superman encounter with the Bizarro World where that society’s objective was the opposite of Earth. For example, beauty was bad and ugly was good. Investments that made money were bad and those that lost money were good. People who

The public market meltdown that started last Friday and continued into Monday morning was met with expected bullish and bearish commentary. What was new for me was the New York Stock Exchange announcing that it would impose “time outs” if the meltdown exceeded certain benchmarks. Those “circuit breaker” benchmarks were revised in May 2012 by

The Financial Times had an interesting article on July 12 about Calpers admitting that it had not tracked the fees it had paid to private equity managers over the last 25 years. Given the SEC crackdown on excessive and hidden fees from some of the largest PE funds in America, the call for Calpers self-examination

Whenever I am getting my sports information from the Wall Street Journal I know I am too busy. There have to be more informed sources like ESPN, Bill James Baseball Abstracts or even Topps baseball cards? But I got an inspiration from the Friday July 17 WSJ article on baseball “The Underdogs: Are These Teams

I recall a conversation I had with one of my law partners at Calfee, Halter in the early 1980’s about private companies “trading” on an exchange. He was an older and smarter securities lawyer who understood many of the nuances that were lost on his junior partner. In those days the liquidity path for a

In a June 2 Wall Street Journal Opinion article, “How to Rein In the SEC”, the authors explored the current trend by the SEC to act as prosecutor, judge and appellate court under its own rules for matters where it has brought the charges against a person or corporation. The authors were former employees of the

It took me most of my investment banking career (1986-1998) to realize that the best private  investors were those who had a margin of safety baked into their investment thesis. For example the leaders were able to mitigate risk by uncovering balance sheet benefits like mispriced real estate, deferred tax upside or poorly managed working

My daughter is a Managing Director at Cambridge Associates (CA) in Boston and she told me about a study that CA had recently completed for its clients on  strategies to leverage relationships with PE sponsors for “no fee, no carry” co-investment opportunities. CA’s study shows a dramatic outperformance of “all in” co-investment strategies over the base

Dick and I have been working on a transaction for the last two months that involves a service business. One of its most critical assets is relationships between the provider and its customers. We have utilized a third party marketing firm with technical expertise in financial services to help us validate the strength of the