In May I attended the graduation ceremonies at Duke University, where I was treated to legendary Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski giving his first ever commencement speech. As a complement to this, on the trip down to Durham I read investor and technologist Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. Both Coach K’s speech and Theil’s book offer …

I recently traveled to Asia to meet with investors and other finance professionals. The 16-hour flight from New York to Hong Kong reminded me that while it may be a small world, it still takes a long time to travel across it. It also gave me time on the return trip to reflect on the …

The beginning of the new year was not the fresh start that most would have hoped for following the tumultuous fourth quarter of 2015. In fact, the first two weeks of January were the worst start to US equity markets ever, even considering the Great Depression and the Great Recession. With many positive factors influencing …

For 2016 there is a simple message: Less is more. The most promising bets for the new year are those that require a little zooming in—deals whose smaller size may preclude larger institutional investors from taking the time and resources to investigate, but whose IRRs command as much attention as or more than the bigger …

The lower middle market in private equity is brimming with opportunity, with an abundant supply of small- to medium-size private businesses available for potential acquisition (see our July-August 2015 issue of The Family Office Alpha Report, which discussed direct private equity investing opportunities). It is not difficult for investors to find reasonably valued companies that …

The trend started several years ago. Spurred on by the astounding private valuations of companies like Facebook, Groupon, and Twitter, the idea of incubating startups took hold, and soon enough hundreds of “incubators” or “business accelerators” sprang up around the country. Today they are usually found near major universities or in big cities, or in …

In their earliest days, they were an investment for well-connected high-net-worth individuals, particularly Europeans and others with access to offshore accounts. Today, hedge funds have evolved into primarily an institutional investment, with most high-net-worth investors funneled through one type of platform or another, or through a family office that follows an institutional framework. A markedly …