Real Assets are so last year

Daily Data: Only one asset class raised more capital than last year. It was the pits for everyone else.

Follow the money, whether smart money or not, time will tell.

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Everything reads better in your browser or in the app. The footnotes especially, and Random Walk is really leaning into the footnotes. Plus, if you have the app, you can set delivery to “app only” and then my daily barrage will feel less like a barrage. Unfortunately, substack does not yet have a “Weekly Digest” option, but I’m hectoring them aplenty.

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Daily Data

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Real assets? No thanks

“Buy low, sell high” sounds obvious, but it’s actually somewhat counterintuitive.

As an investor (or operator), you want to go where the money is, but at the same time, if your money follows all the other money that’s already there, that sounds a lot like buying high.

Likewise, no one wants to grab a seat on a sinking ship . . . even if a sinking ship is a surefire way to buy low. Unless, of course, the ship is salvageable, and you were the only one to notice because you were the only one there.

Anyways, “following the money” can be either a buy signal or an overbought signal. Likewise, “everyone running the other direction” can be a good time to start running, but the hard part is knowing which way to run.

Follow the money

Pitchbook released its latest private market fundraising report, which is always a good opportunity to follow the money.

This is a Daily Data, so just some quick observations:

• It’s tough sledding out there. The amount of money raised and the number of funds closed, are all down. The time to close for fundraising has gotten longer. The only asset class to raise more on a YoY basis are secondary funds:

  

  Secondaries FTW

• In Real Estate, it’s good to be a very experienced manager. Generally, experienced managers took the lion’s share of the funding, but in Real Estate, especially so. Almost implausibly, half of the real estate capital raised went to fund series 10 (or later):

  

  Real Estate investors putting a premium on experienced managers

  Likewise, 96% of the funding went to experienced managers (apparently raising their 11th funds), as opposed to emerging ones.

• Venture Capital is more Chinese than I thought: Random Walk had erroneously