u/Intelligent_Boot_206

Hey guys,
I feel like this is worth talking about ...
The people selling private credit are actually spending a lot of time telling investors that everything is fine. That alone should tell you something about where things are standing.

Bloomberg reported last week that non traded private credit BDCs had net outflows in Q1 2026 for the first time ever. They gave back about $7 billion to investors but only raised $5 billion.

Redemption requests across the whole sector were very high, somewhere between $14 billion and $20 billion. The funds paid out some of it, but a lot is still stuck behind gates.

Some retail heavy funds got hit especially hard. At Blue Owl, one of their tech focused vehicles had over 40% of investors asking to get out. They had to enforce the normal 5% quarterly limit.

Managers are trying so hard to explain.They keep saying the actual loans in the portfolios are still performing well and this is mostly just nervous investors and not bad credit.

Goldman Sachs has been honest about it. They said their platform did better because most of their money comes from institutions who don’t panic. They’ve also stopped calling these funds semi liquid.

If that wasn't enough, Moody’s just changed their outlook for the whole BDC sector to negative and the DOJ is looking into how BlackRock values assets in its TCP Capital fund. That investigation is still early.

The loans themselves may be okay as the managers are saying, but the difference between how these products were sold to regular investors and how liquid they actually are is now actually being tested.

Hey guys ,
The DOJ started asking questions about private credit valuations and looking at it..Goldman quietly stopped using the word semi liquid.I think these two things together matter so much.

The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office has been asking for information on how BlackRock values assets in one of its private credit funds. This is still early, with no charges and no accusations of wrongdoing. But federal prosecutors are now looking at how these funds set their marks. The whole asset class has always used quarterly marks and a lot of manager judgment. Now that lack of transparency is getting attention.

Goldman Sachs has stopped calling these evergreen private credit funds semi liquid. Their research says these retail funds will likely stay in net outflows through 2026 and probably into 2027. Sales are about 50% lower than last year, redemptions are increasing and most funds will keep capping redemptions at 5%. That means investors who want their money back could be waiting in line for over a year.

When one of the biggest distributors to wealth clients stops using that liquidity language, it feels like they’re admitting the original marketing promised more liquidity than actually exists.

When you put the two together, private credit feels like it’s at a turning point. The things managers liked eg...opacity and stable marks, are now under scrutiny. The things that attracted retail investors are being quietly pulled back.

Hi guys,
The way most of us access private markets is about to change.

Franklin Templeton launched new Private Markets Model Portfolios on Corastone. Corastone is a permissioned blockchain network for private markets. These are single subscription portfolios that give you diversified exposure to private equity, private credit, real estate and infrastructure all in one vehicle.

You hold the actual underlying funds directly instead of through a fund of funds. That gives better transparency and makes rebalancing easier than the usual quarterly process.

Corastone only started last November. In just a few months it already has Apollo, KKR, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Hamilton Lane and others all on the same platform. That’s moving very quickly.

It's fixing the operational mess that makes private markets hard to manage at scale. Subscriptions, rebalancing and reporting from different managers, along with all the manual work and different systems, have been a real barrier for most advisors and family offices. This simplifies a lot of that.

It doesn’t solve high minimums or long lockups, but it does remove a lot of the complexity that has kept well diversified private market portfolios mostly for very large institutions.

Franklin Templeton is so serious about this. Their alternatives business is already around $280 billion. They clearly believe this kind of standardized infrastructure is the future.

So what this means over the next three to five years is...If the operational side gets much easier, a lot more people and smaller institutions will actually be able to build real alternatives allocations.

Hey guys,

One of the smartest credit traders out there tried to buy private credit at a 35% discount and almost nobody took the offer. That outcome surprised me and I think its nice.

Boaz Weinstein from Saba Capital went on CNBC recently and warned that private credit has growing problems because many funds promise liquidity they can’t actually deliver. Then he backed it up. He and Cox Capital made a tender offer to buy shares in Blue Owl Capital Corporation II at a 34.9% discount to NAV. They made similar offers for a few other funds too. The message was if you’re stuck and want out, we’ll give you real cash right now.

This came at a time when Blue Owl had stopped redemptions in that fund and was selling assets to pay people back. A lot of these non traded funds were seeing redemption requests pile up way above their normal limits.Almostt no one sold. The tender offer got less than 1% participation.

It could mean the people actually in these funds believe the loans inside are worth more than a 35% haircut. They would rather stay in and wait for normal redemptions than sell cheap. That’s a sign of confidence in the underlying assets.

Or it could mean investors are so locked in, both by the rules and by their own mindset, that they won’t accept a big loss even when someone credible offers them an exit.

Weinstein has said he’s actually bullish on the biggest managers like Ares, Apollo and Blackstone. He even bought their public shares. His point seems to be that the real problems sit in the smaller funds and retail focused vehicles, not the large institutional platforms.

Hey,
So Apollo announced daily pricing for a huge part of their private credit business.

On their earnings call, Apollo said they will start giving daily prices on more than $830 billion of their credit assets by the end of September. Marc Rowan mentioned that some of their big competitors are pushing back against this kind of transparency.

A lot of us like private credit because the returns feel steady and don’t bounce around like public bonds. But the smoothness mostly comes from only getting updates once every three months. Daily pricing won’t change the actual loans but just show more of the real ups and downs that were hidden before.

The same day Apollo made this announcement, the Financial Stability Board put out a report pointing out problems in private credit like unclear valuations and too much risk in certain sectors. Then Rowan said recent bad headlines and coming regulations helped push them to do this.

Even with daily prices, these are still estimates based on models. They’re not real traded prices like stocks or bonds. So there's more frequent numbers, but they won’t be perfectly consistent between different firms.What happens when investors and committees start seeing extra volatility every day?

Rowan believes more transparency will build trust and make the market bigger. Some other firms seem to think the opposite.

Hey guys,
Let's talk about secondaries doing so well. I think it’s one of the most useful tools that most alternative investors still aren’t using well.

In 2025, the total secondaries volume reached $226 billion. LP led deals hit $120 billion ,up 34%. GP led deals hit $106 billion, up 51%. Even the early signs show the first half this year might likely go over $100 billion.

This market used to be just for emergency exits. Now it has also become a normal part of how smart investors manage their private market portfolios.

Good buyout stakes are now selling at about 94% of NAV. A few years ago, they were going for less than 90%. So you no longer have to take a big loss if you want to sell.

The reason the volume is so high is because of very slow distributions from funds, fewer companies getting sold and the shift toward infrastructure and private credit.

When you buy on the secondary market, you get mature assets that are already invested. You skip most of the J curve, you can see the actual companies and your money comes back faster. I am expecting pricing to stay steady or get even better.

Hey guys,
New data came out showing that big institutions are putting way more of their money into just a handful of giant alternative managers.

Canoe Intelligence released their Q4 2025 report. They track over 44,000 funds. The top 50 managers now control 51% of all investor money. That’s up from 45% just a few months ago and it’s the highest concentration they’ve ever seen.

So this isn’t just old money sitting there, big managers are getting most of the new commitments too. Institutions are actively choosing to send fresh capital to the largest platforms.

That leaves the middle market managers in a tough spot. They’re fighting over a smaller and smaller share of the market.

The only positive area was infrastructure. It’s the only asset class that has taken in more money than it paid out for four quarters straight...Q4 was the strongest quarter they’ve ever recorded. This goes hand in hand with all the AI power demand and energy needs we’re seeing.

The largest platforms have advantages including better deal access, insurance money, stronger distribution and the ability to offer better terms. They will keep building on themselves over time.

If you have a good mid sized manager, you have to ask some hard questions. Can they still compete for the best deals and attract top people over the next few years? Or are we moving toward a world where only the biggest firms have a clear edge?

While everyone is complaining about how hard it is for alternative asset managers, one firm just raised $67 billion in four months. The gap between winners and losers is getting bigger.

Brookfield reported their earnings. They raised $21 billion in the first quarter and $67 billion so far this year. That’s more than they raised in all of 2025 and it only took four months. Their fee paying capital is now $614 billion, up by 12% from last year.
Their CEO said 2026 should be a record year for fundraising.

Meanwhile, a bunch of other big alt managers are down 20-30% this year. Same business, but totally different results.

Brookfield is winning because they’re heavy in real assets, AI infrastructure and credit. Insurance money is flowing in too. They just picked up a big $40 billion mandate from buying Just Group.

Credit fundraising was especially strong, with $13.4 billion in the quarter.

The industry is splitting. Firms that are good at real assets, infrastructure and credit are pulling way ahead. The ones still doing old school private equity are struggling more.

It should make you think more about how you pick managers. If your alternatives platform doesn’t have real strength in these areas, maybe that’s a problem.

Litigation investing is actually a really interesting alternative right now.

Corbin Capital Partners, a $10 billion alternatives firm closed their first dedicated litigation finance fund at $342 million last week. They’ve already invested in 26 cases. The investors include big institutions, rich individuals and family offices.

What I found interesting is how they’re talking about it. Their guy running the fund said the risk here is pure legal risk, not the macro problems or software exposure you see in a lot of private credit right now.This makes sense. When private equity and private credit are both struggling, something truly uncorrelated starts looking pretty good.

The fund gives money to people or law firms fighting big lawsuits, including business disputes, antitrust, patents, mass torts and bankruptcy cases. If they win or settle, the fund gets a cut of the money. Corbin focuses on later stage cases, tries to keep the timelines shorter and spreads the bets around.

The returns don’t follow the stock market or interest rates. They only depend on how the lawsuits turn out.

The risk is you can’t predict court outcomes. One bad case can hurt. Some cases drag on for years. Am so sure that regulators are watching this space more closely.

Still, the idea of returns that don’t move with everything else is pretty nicee and attractive right now.

Hey guys,
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. CAAT Pension Plan manages over $25 billion. They reported their 2025 numbers. Their private equity portion only made 1.5%, while their benchmark was 19.6%. That’s an 18 point miss. Their whole portfolio returned 8.4% and missed its target mostly because of private equity.

It’s not just them. The Alaska Permanent Fund, which is $85 billion, now wants to cut their private equity target from 18% down to 15%. Some big consultants are forecasting around 6% annual returns for private equity over the next five years.

You lock your money up for 8 to 10 years, pay high fees, get no liquidity and take real risks. The math is starting to look bad.

At the same time, institutions are putting more money into private credit. So they’re pulling back on private equity and going harder into private debt.

The whole reason to do private equity was to get much higher returns than public stocks because you accept all those downsides. But when stocks do over 20% and private equity barely makes anything, that extra return basically disappears.

This is a lesson that we should stop assuming alternatives will always beat public markets.

Hey everyone,
So Nvidia just became one of the biggest investors in AI so let's talk about it.

They’ve already committed over $40 billion to AI companies in just the first four months of 2026. That includes a $30 billion investment in OpenAI. They also put $3.2 billion into Corning, $2.1 billion into a data center company called IREN and a bunch of other big deals in startups.

That’s a crazy amount of money for a chipmaker to spend so fast. The question is what this means for everyone else investing in AI.

A lot of these deals feel circular. Nvidia invests in a company and then that company buys a ton of Nvidia chips. CoreWeave is the best example...Nvidia owns part of it and sells them a huge amount of hardware.

Nvidia made $97 billion in free cash flow last year. Now they’re using that money to invest across the whole AI supply chain so everyone keeps using their chips. When a $5 trillion company does this, it changes the game for other investors.

Their bets are making money, like the Intel investment that turned $5 billion into over $25 billion quickly. But I wonder if this setup is pumping up AI valuations in a way that won’t hold up later.

Global M&A just hit a record $1.6 trillion in one quarter. But if you take out one deal, the picture looks a lot different.

The Q1 2026 numbers came out . Total M&A reached $1.6 trillion, which is a new record and up over 50% from last year. A lot of people are saying dealmaking is back and everything is booming. I think we need to pump the brakes.

If you strip out the $250 billion SpaceX buy of xAI, which was basically one Elon company buying another, the rest of the market actually fell. IT deal value dropped over 50% from last quarter. Total deal count was only about 7,900, which is 30% lower than last year. So the headline looks huge, but there are way fewer deals getting done. Everything is concentrated in just a few massive ones.

The sectors that did well were energy, up almost 60%, and consumer deals, up about 39%. Real assets and businesses that can handle inflation are moving. But healthcare dropped over 20%, financial services fell over 30% and materials were down nearly 56%. The same split we see in the stock market is happening in M&A too.

Private equity is pretty active. They did about 40% of the deals and half the value. They still have over $3 trillion in dry powder, so more big take privates are probably coming. The big Electronic Arts deal might just be the start.

The record number is real, but it’s kind of misleading. The very top is strong, the middle is weak and only certain sectors have real conviction right now.

Hey guys,

I’ve been noticing a big shift in how money is moving in private markets this year.

Secondary deals..where you buy existing stakes in funds or companies from other investors are on track to hit record volume in 2026. Some people think it could top $300 billion.

A lot of big institutions are now putting more of their new money into secondaries instead of committing to brand new primary funds.

The reason is making sense because holding periods are getting longer and exits are still slow.

Secondaries let you buy into companies that are already 3 to 6 years old. You get to skip the blind pool and the early J-curve, and you get more visibility into what you’re actually buying.

It’s also giving LPs more control. You can pick known companies, known managers and known vintages instead of waiting years for capital calls.

Hey everyone,

This is something guys with private equity exposure are dealing with right now.

Continuation funds used to be rare. Now they’re becoming one of the main ways private equity firms exit investments. In 2025 there were a record 147 of these deals. That’s up 18.5% from the year before. Industry forecasts say they could make up about 20% of all private equity distributions this year.

A GP takes a company from an old fund and moves it into a brand new fund that they also manage. The existing investors get to choose to sell now and take the cash or roll their money into the new fund. New investors come in to help buy it.

But the problem is that the same GP is on both sides of the deal ...selling and buying. That creates a clear conflict of interest on the price. A lot of the original investors who know the company best end up taking the cash instead of rolling over.

There have even been lawsuits over this. Late last year, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund sued a private equity firm in Delaware, claiming the firm used unfair tactics in one of these continuation deals.

As an LP, I’ve learned to look very carefully when one of these comes up. Check the valuation, how much the GP has in the new fund, the new fees and whether independent people reviewed the deal.

Hey guys,

Private equity is doing fewer deals than at any point in the last five years, but they’re spending more money than ever.

Deal volume hit its lowest point since early 2021, but firms still spent $436 billion. So instead of doing lots of deals, they’re putting huge amounts of money into a smaller number of companies.

The average buyout got bigger btw. Mid market deals are getting squeezed because public markets are unstable and credit is tighter right now. Big firms are chasing the big trophy assets while the middle of the market are starting to dry up. This is where a lot of investors expected steady returns.

Exits still look weak. There were only about 635 exits worth $294 billion. A lot of older portfolio companies are still sitting unsold. So firms are still buying aggressively but they’re not exiting old investments fast enough. So the pressure keeps building.

So this eventually lines up with the growing power demand from AI and the move toward real assets.

Hey guys,
The New York Stock Exchange filed a proposed rule change to enable trading of tokenized versions of securities directly on its platform. These tokenized shares and ETFs would trade alongside traditional ones with the same tickers, integrated order book and the same execution, while settlement still runs T+1 through DTC. So this is the he NYSE formally integrating tokenized securities into mainstream market structure.

This also builds directly on the DTCC and DTC three year tokenization pilot that received an SEC no action letter in December last year. So the infrastructure pieces are actually moving.

On the market size side, tokenized real world assets sit in the mid $20B to low $30B range for on chain value as of late. That is still small compared to traditional markets, but the trajectory is real. Alot of that capital has gone into yield bearing assets like tokenized Treasuries, private credit and funds.

Why should this matter to alts?

We’ve complained for years about the access problem, including high minimums, long lockups, opaque secondaries and gatekeeper heavy structures in private equity, private credit, real estate ..etc. So tokenization offers a potential path to fractional ownership, better liquidity windows and programmable compliance without throwing out the regulatory framework.

Big wigs are already leaning in. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund has crossed the $2B mark. Larry Fink also highlighted in his 2026 letter how tokenization can update the plumbing to make previously hard to access assets easier to use issue, trade and allocate into. Franklin Templeton has also been expanding its tokenized offerings and institutional partnerships and JPM launched its own tokenized money market fund late last year.

The big publicly listed alternative asset managers have had a rough start to 2026 in the stock market. TPG is down around 30% YTD, Blackstone has been hit hard and the rest of the group (Carlyle, Blue Owl, etc.) has also sold off. Yet when you look at the private funds these same firms manage, the NAVs are still sitting near their highs with relatively little movement.

This is interesting. The public market is essentially giving a real time verdict on the health of the private markets business. This includes fundraising, fee revenue, deal activity and the exit environment. When those stocks are down sharply, it is telling you something about what sophisticated investors think the near term outlook looks like. Meanwhile, most LP statements are still showing private valuations that have not moved much.

The private marks are not wrong. Private valuations are designed to lag and smooth things out. But the lag works both ways and it makes me wonder whether LPs sitting on marks near highs are seeing a fully accurate picture right now, especially when the public market is pricing in more caution.

Hey, lets talk about the latest PERE issue.

The May issue has a story basically doing a private real estate loss investigation . Investors asking whether underperforming deals were bad market timing or managerial missteps. That feels relevant because research from the University of Wisconsin showed private real estate averaged about 7% annual returns over a decade compared to about 14.5% for buyouts and about 10.9% for venture.

Private real estate has this reputation as the stable, quiet part of an alt portfolio with inflation protection, steady income and low correlation to stocks. But the numbers are suggesting that it has been quietly lagging its private markets peers for years and we don't scrutinize it as hard as we do private equity or venture.

What's interesting right now is where the money is actually going. Transaction volumes in private real estate are up meaningfully in Q1 2026 and debt strategies are taking a bigger share of new commitments. Investors seem to have more conviction in senior debt with current income and good spreads than in equity plays.

So lets be accountable .We should be really stress testing our real estate managers against benchmarks instead of just rolling commitments because the relationship is comfortable. Also we should have real exposure to the part of real estate that is working vs the parts that have lagged.

Hi ,

Man Group, the world’s largest publicly listed hedge fund, had a single institutional client pull $6.1 billion from one of its long only systematic equity strategies in Q1. Shares dropped more than 7% on the news and overall AUM was basically flat.

From what I understand, it was not a performance issue. It was a strategic reallocation by the client. Still, one big ticket moving billions had an immediate visible impact.

What I keep thinking about is the concentration risk on the liability side. We all obsess over portfolio concentration on the asset side, like one sector or one manager but when a meaningful portion of AUM sits with a handful of very large institutions, one committee decision can shift the whole picture. That dynamic feels increasingly common as the industry has become more reliant on big wealth funds, pensions and endowments.

It also ties into the broader trend we have seen with longer lockups, tighter gates and more restrictive liquidity terms. Managers are trying to protect themselves from exactly this kind of lumpy institutional flow.

Its not all bad because a stable and sophisticated capital has benefits. But it does make me pause and check whether my own alt book has more liquidity risks than I realize.

Hey,

Greg Coffey’s Kirkoswald Asset Management just launched a new share class that can lock up capital for up to five years. The idea is that strong demand lets them offer more stable, longer term capital to the manager. This can help reduce redemption pressure and allow for less liquid positions.

This isn’t alone, as a number of other strong performing hedge funds have been moving in a similar direction and using good recent performance to negotiate longer lockups and tighter redemption terms.

It makes sense from the manager’s side, because more stability can lead to better returns over time. But as LPs, it does mean our overall portfolio liquidity is shifting. We’ve already seen this in semiliquid private credit and evergreen vehicles, where redemption queues appeared when demand spiked.

The bull case for accepting longer lockups is real, since managers can run higher conviction books without forced selling. So check whether your total alternatives book still has the liquidity profile you thought was there or if you’ve been slowly accepting longer terms across managers without fully seeing the combined impact.