What Is an Earnout? How Buyers and Sellers Share the Risk of an Acquisition
What happens when a buyer and seller agree on what a company is worth today but disagree about what it could be worth tomorrow? That valuation gap is one reason an earnout can become part of an acquisition’s purchase price. Instead of paying the entire agreed value at closing, the buyer makes part of the […]
Carried Interest in Private Equity: How Fund Structures Shape Investor Returns
“20% carried interest” sounds simple. It is not. An investor looking only at the headline carry percentage can miss some of the most important terms governing a private equity fund. The eventual economics can depend on the preferred return, catch-up provision, distribution waterfall, management fees, fund expenses, clawbacks and, importantly, when the general partner becomes […]
The Insurance Brokerage Buyout Wave: Why Recurring-Revenue Financial Services Are Attracting Private Capital
Private capital is increasingly treating insurance distribution as more than a collection of small agencies. Insurance brokerages can form scalable financial-services platforms built around client relationships, renewal-driven revenue and a fragmented acquisition landscape. That is helping drive the insurance brokerage buyout wave across the United States. The market is active, but it is becoming more […]
What Investors Should Look for Before Investing in a Private Company
The hardest part of investing in a private company is often not finding a promising business. It is determining whether the price, risks, and terms justify owning a piece of it. Investing in a private company can provide exposure to growing businesses and entrepreneurial opportunities, but investors generally face less standardized disclosure and less liquidity […]
The Rise of Continuation Funds in Private Equity
The traditional private equity exit was built around a relatively simple sequence: buy a business, improve it, and sell it within the life of a fund. That timetable is becoming more flexible. Continuation funds have emerged as one of the mechanisms allowing investors and managers to separate the need for liquidity from the decision to […]
What Family Offices Can Learn from University Endowment Investing
Preserving wealth across generations requires a different mindset from simply maximizing returns over the next market cycle. For sophisticated family office investing, the more useful question is how a portfolio can compound while surviving changing interest rates, recessions, liquidity shocks, and shifts in market leadership. That is where large university endowments offer an instructive framework: […]
How University Endowments Built the Alternative Investing Playbook
The biggest innovation in institutional investing did not originate on Wall Street. It emerged from university campuses, where a handful of endowment managers challenged decades of conventional portfolio thinking. Today, university endowment investing has become one of the most influential frameworks in modern finance, demonstrating how disciplined asset allocation, portfolio diversification, and long-term thinking can […]
High-Growth Alternative Assets: The Investment Opportunities Traditional Portfolios Are Missing
Let me ask you something: when was the last time you actually felt good about your portfolio? If you’re like most investors, the answer is probably “not recently.” The 60/40 portfolio 60% stocks, 40% bonds has been the gold standard for decades. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: that playbook is broken. And nobody told you. […]
Why Private Credit Has Become Wall Street’s Fastest-Growing Asset Class
The private credit market now spans roughly $2 trillion in direct lending worldwide, with the IMF putting total assets and committed capital at $2.1 trillion, about three-quarters of it in the United States. In barely fifteen years, lending by non-bank funds has grown from a post-crisis workaround into a market nearing the size of America’s […]
Where the Ultra-Wealthy Are Putting Capital to Work
Ultra-wealthy investments have evolved far beyond traditional stock and bond portfolios. Today’s billionaires, family offices, and institutional investors increasingly allocate capital across private markets, real assets, and alternative strategies designed to preserve wealth through changing economic cycles. Rather than pursuing the highest possible returns, many affluent investors now prioritize resilience, disciplined wealth management, and long-term […]
