As I wrote in my previous post, PE investing is fraught with danger.
See Pensions and their PE Woes - even the biggest funds on the planet often lose money on PE; and that is with every resource in the world working for them.
On the other hand, some of my mentors in the family office world build multi-billion dollar portfolios around the thesis that PE is the best performing asset class in the world.
Not only the best performing, but lowest risk.
A proof: many have over half of their own assets in PE.
How do they avoid the traps that many institutional investors fall into?
Namely: Fee erosion and fund manager underperformance.
And since Family Offices are taxable investors, they also have to contend with Uncle Sam grabbing their profits as well!
Here are some principles:
1. Smaller ($100-300M), newer funds perform much better than enormous old funds ($billions).
Why? Young, up and coming managers are motivated to make a name for themselves. They are not yet rich off of fees.
Also, they can play in smaller deals, which often have less competition to bid prices up and less overall multiple expansion.
2. Being a big fish in a small pond provides leverage to negotiate lower fees.
Big co-investment teams of family offices get together and select funds, then negotiate those fees down so that everyone wins. The fund raises a big chunk of money in one shot, the investment group gets good fees. Everyone wins.
3. The right Family Office Legal structure allows FOs to deduct management fees as business expenses.
At a high tax rate - ~50% - this can mean millions in savings per year. This is the low hanging fruit of high-net-worth planning strategy.
4. Investing with a platform that automatically reinvests distributed capital into new funds - creating a flywheel effect.
This requires software to analyze a portfolio, see where there is over and underexposure in Private Markets, and highlighting which type of fund the next distribution will go to.
It also requires communication with fund managers as to when they will be calling and distributing capital, in order to properly rebalance the family's portfolio at the tempo that fits their PE investments.
The results are automatically aligning your distributions with another fund's capital calls, all while accounting for sector exposure parameters.
This also requires a steady stream of diligenced investments.
Sophisticated PE platforms analyze 600-1200 open funds per year, selecting and investing in the best ~1% and offering those curated investments as co-investments to their team.
5. This is a relatively new one: Private Placement Life Insurance.
If you want to get fancy, pop it into a Dynasty Trust. PPLI is an insurance wrapper that allows an RIA to manage your PE portfolio, 100% income and estate-tax free.
Fun fact: 1/3 of the Santa Monica pier is owned in a PPLI wrapper by an UHNW estate.
The result: a PE machine that returns 15-25% per year, with fees deducted, possibly income tax and estate tax free.
Since the funds are so well diligenced, the only real risk is liquidity risk.
I'll put it like this: in the 2008 credit crisis, a platform I know had a private credit portfolio.
Their default rate went from 0.5% to 1.5% and they returned 9% profit for 2008, as opposed to the 12% average return for all other years.
In the worst year ever for private credit.
But that is for another essay.
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