Sai Devabhaktuni, Senior Managing Director, recently joined other Private Equity Leaders for a discussion on Portfolio Construction at the 2025 Mergermarket Private Equity Forum. 

The private equity playbook is being rewritten and reshaping how investors operate. Longer holding periods, slower exit activity, and changing GP behaviours are driving institutional allocators to rethink traditional approaches. At the recent Mergermarket Private Equity Forumin Austin, industry leaders gathered to discuss how they are evolving portfolio construction in today’s environment.  

Navigating the slower flywheel  

Sai Devabhaktuni, Senior Managing Director at BCI Private Equity, shared how BCI is navigating these market challenges. “The investment – value creation – monetization flywheel is not spinning as fast as it should be.” Put simply, private equity firms are taking longer to exit investments and return capital while simultaneously approaching investors for new fund commitments.  

In response to these extended timelines, BCI has recalibrated its capital deployment and is taking a more deliberate approach on both the timing and the sizing of commitments.  BCI’s disciplined strategy includes being more selective on investments and active portfolio management that carefully weigh risk exposures across holdings.  

Dynamic portfolio management  

At the same time, Devabhaktuni outlined three areas where BCI Private Equity is adapting: 

• Building strategic GP relationships: Moving toward fewer, deeper partnerships while prioritizing managers with strong value creation capabilities, AI adoption, and robust succession planning. As Devabhaktuni explained, “As we’re deploying capital… that capital will be there for an extended period of time, we need to make sure it’s protected and there’s continuity.” That said, BCI remains open to new partnerships: “If an interesting opportunity comes up and there’s a value proposition, we’ll engage. The bar is higher, but we’ll engage.” 

• Implementing broad diversification: The strategy spreads investments across firm sizes, geographies, and capital stack positions to build portfolio stability. “We want to construct a portfolio that is resilient and diverse in terms of the size of private equity firms we engage with—not just large cap but also middle market.” Geographically, the team favors a regional approach, maintaining diversified exposure across markets rather than taking concentrated country-specific positions. 

• Flexible, active portfolio management:  BCI tactically rebalances its exposure as market conditions evolve.  This may include utilizing the secondary markets, altering the risk/reward paradigm by moving up the capital structure or obtaining exposures through continuation vehicles. As it relates to continuation vehicles, BCI takes a case-by-case approach to each opportunity. “There’s no default option from our perspective; everything is bespoke.”   

Looking ahead  

Managing nearly C$34 billion in assets under management through 80+ investment professionals across Victoria, New York, and London, BCI Private Equity reflects how leading investors are adapting to markets with active portfolio management while maintaining a focus on long-term value creation. Current market dynamics will likely persist with evolving distribution patterns—a reality that prompted Sai to note, “It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the future.” BCI’s agile approach, characterized by flexible deal structuring and disciplined investing, enhances the firm’s ability to respond to these conditions.  

You can watch a recording of the full panel discussion on BCI's website here. 

I cannot embed it below because the embed code isn't public but it's worth listening to this panel discussion.

Fast forward to minute 6 to listen to Sai's comments.

He discusses a well-known problem in that GPs are not exiting their investments fast enough and coming back to LPs to re-up, meaning to ask for more capital.

In response, BCI is "recalibrating" its  capital deployment, a fancy term which just means they're slowing things down, carefully evaluating whether to re-up with funds, looking at building new strategic relationships where warranted, and just managing liquidity a lot tighter using secondaries market which offers decent pricing.

Sai says there are a lot of structural factors affecting PE portfolios in 2025 -- 2022 inflated pricing, higher rates to name two -- but they are adapting to the new reality and focusing more on managing risk.

He talks about how they're thinking through a lot of issues like stagflation, probability of recession, AI bubbles in public markets and they're constructing a portfolio which is resilient both in terms of sectors and geographies.

They're also thinking hard about structured equity and how they can use it to manage risk better. 

Anyways, there is more to this panel discussion so take the time to listen to all the panellists' views here. 

Again, I cannot embed the discussion below so watch it here.  

My only remarks are that private equity is still struggling, especially the smaller less well-known funds.

Steve Weiss made a comment today (watch clip below at minute 2) where there were "36 bids" at an auction run by an investment bank and that competition is ferocious in the space especially for smaller players. As far as the big players, he rightly notes the IPO markets for PE related investments remains shut (only tech IPOs are doing well).

Ilya Gridneff and Mary McDougall of the Financial Times report Canada tells pension funds to invest at home in age of ‘economic nationalism’:

Canada is calling on its C$3tn (US$2.1tn) pension system to boost domestic investment as it seeks C$500bn in new finance to reboot the economy and lower its dependence on the US.

Industry minister Mélanie Joly told the Financial Times the new wave of “economic nationalism” means Canada’s financial institutions must foster homegrown investments and major infrastructure projects to kick-start the country’s sluggish economy.

“I’ve had lots of conversations with our banks, and our pension funds. There’s a sentiment that we need to think about Canada first and that we need to put capital where our mouth is,” she said.

This month Joly launched an industrial strategy aimed at creating jobs and attracting foreign investment in response to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada.

“For a long time pension funds have said that they need to provide yields to their beneficiaries . . . but they can have a discussion with their beneficiaries about their impact in their own country, their own environment, where beneficiaries live,” she said.

Like the UK, Canada has been examining how to channel more pension assets to domestic targets to combat weak productivity and poor business investment.

Last year more than 90 Canadian corporate executives signed an open letter calling on the government to amend rules which would allow them to increase domestic investments, saying the amount they allocated to Canadian equities had dwindled from 28 per cent in 2000 to 4 per cent by 2023.

Ottawa in December lifted its 30 per cent cap for investments in Canadian entities at a time when Trump was threatening tariffs and trade wars against its major trading partner.

“This will make it easier for Canadian pension funds to make significant investments in Canadian entities,” said the finance ministry’s Fall Economic Statement.

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the country’s largest fund with C$714bn of assets, revealed its total allocation to Canadian assets dropped to 12 per cent of the fund in March from 14 per cent two years earlier, although the total value of Canadian assets still increased.

But Paul Beaudry, a former Bank of Canada deputy governor, warned forcing funds to invest locally was “very dangerous” as it risked creating “a type of crony capitalism”.

Beaudry said the government could identify either socially beneficial projects or mid-level companies that big funds overlooked for investment.

“I’m not against pushing it but I like it to be more on the incentive part than on the idea of kind of forcing it,” he said.

Prime Minister Mark Carney launched a “Buy Canada” campaign last month that prioritises local products for procurement as a way to make Canada “the strongest economy in the G7”.

It is an ambitious goal considering the country’s economy shrunk more than expected in the second quarter while exports fell 7.5 per cent compared with the first three months of the year because of the tariffs, according to Statistics Canada.

Canada has also set up its Major Projects Office to fast track national infrastructure proposals and to create a positive investment environment for financial institutions such as its pension funds.

The government is also potentially lowering the 90 per cent threshold that limits municipal-owned utilities from attracting more than 10 per cent private sector ownership, in particular from Canadian pension funds.

CPP Investments has nearly 50 per cent of all its assets invested in the US, despite pressure from Ottawa to invest more in its home market. Similarly Omers, the pension fund for Ontarian municipal workers with C$141bn of assets, had 16 per cent invested in Canada and 55 per cent invested in the US at the end of June.

“Dozens of policymakers have frequently commented in recent years about welcoming more investments into Canada and our approach remains unwavering and steadfast,” CPP Investments said. “We act in the best interests of contributors and beneficiaries in line with the pension promise.”

CPP Investments in July announced a C$225mn investment in a new data centre in Cambridge, Ontario. It also has a $1.7bn investment in Canadian Natural Resources, the country’s largest energy producer.

Other Canadian funds have a higher domestic allocation, such as the C$123bn Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, which has more than 55 per cent of assets invested in Canada, and the C$270bn Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan which has 36 per cent.

I must admit these articles are starting to irritate me.

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly shouldn't be publicly commenting on Canadian pension plans as they don't fall under her purview. 

I don't know why she's giving interviews to the FT to discuss this matter publicly, it sends all the wrong messages to people reading it throughout the world, namely, that Ottawa dictates where Canada's large pension funds invest.

But the truth is Canada's large pension funds/ plans operate independently from governments.

Yes, the board of directors at two of the largest Crown corporations in Canada -- CPP Investments and PSP Investments -- is nominated by the federal government and provincial governments (in the case of CPP Investments) but that's about it.

Governments have no say whatsoever on how they manage pension assets or where they invest, all they can do is hold these pension funds to the highest standards of transparency and force them to divulge a lot of details on where they invest.

Governments can hold consultations with these large pension funds and they hold enormous influence over them but they cannot manage their day to day operations or force them to invest more domestically.

That's just silly and counterproductive, you don't want government bureaucrats with no skin in the game telling large pension funds where to invest.

What governments can do is create the winning conditions to allow large domestic pension funds to invest more domestically, in particular in infrastructure assets.

I discussed this in my last comment here and this is where the federal and provincial governments can play a critical role:

At the heart of this report lies "The Investible Window" which provides the winning conditions for pension funds to invest more domestically:

Basically, in a nutshell, pension funds want to invest in highly scalable projects that provide competitive risk-adjusted returns, they want good governance rights and they prefer brownfield over greenfield assets, meaning an asset that is already operational and has know cash flows.

The report also explicitly states: "Benchmarking against global peers is the norm. The fact that a project is domestic is not sufficient justification for sub-commercial returns."

What does this mean in practice? It means Canada's large pension funds aren't averse to investing in large domestic projects where they have no currency risk as long as these projects are scalable and offer competitive returns relative to what they can get elsewhere.

The report offers a lot more details and provides more context but I'm boiling it down to what is critically important. 

Anyway, take the time to read the entire report here, well worth it and I certainly hope it helps bridging the disconnect between policy and practical pension investments.  

What about CDPQ and its dual mandate to maximize returns and help develop Quebec's economy?

What about it? It's going well now but I remember a time not too long ago when it was a disaster and fraught with scandals, corruption and outright fraud.

Moreover, if we were honest with Quebecers, we would publish the opportunity cost of all this domestic investment relative to going global and investing and co-investing alongside top alternative funds which CDPQ also does and does well.

So, while the dual mandate works at CDPQ and can work at other large Canadian pension funds, I'm far from certain it's in the best interest of pension contributors and beneficiaries or the Canadian economy.

Besides, you would need to adopt new laws to change the governance at these funds, no easy feat.

All this to say with all due respect to Industry Minister Mélanie Joly, please stay in your lane and let experts like the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Timothy Hodgson who actually sat on pension boards discuss this matter publicly.

One final thing, the article ends by noting:

Other Canadian funds have a higher domestic allocation, such as the C$123bn Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, which has more than 55 per cent of assets invested in Canada, and the C$270bn Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan which has 36 per cent.

Again, regular people reading this have no context and don't understand the liability-driven investments at HOOPP and OTPP which necessitates a high allocation to Canadian fixed income.

In other words, every pension fund and plan is different with a different mandate and asset mix but regular people reading this article are totally clueless.

And CPP Investments is managing close to $800 billion in assets, I'd be very concerned if their allocation to Canada was similar to smaller funds or plans.

I can go on and on but let me stop there, I take all these articles with a grain of salt, they're mostly meaningless gibberish.

Below,Industry Minister Melanie Joly address the news that GM will end production of its BrightDrop EV in Ingersoll, Ontario. 

Like I said, Joly should be talking about industries, that's her job, leave pension funds to experts who understand all the intricacies involved.

And CNBC's 'Fast Money' team discusses General Motors as the automaker beats earnings expectations on the top and bottom lines.

Susanna Rust of IPE reports pension fund execs tackle ‘disconnect’ as governments target institutional capital:

A group of senior-level executives from major pension funds across the world have developed a guide to help governments understand how they can successfully attract domestic institutional capital to help achieve their policy goals. 

The guide is the output of a working group of the International Centre for Pension Management (ICPM), a global network of more than 50 pension funds and related organisations that together manage more than $8trn (€6.9trn) of assets.

Sebastien Betermier (featured above), ICPM executive director and a lead author of the new paper alongside Onno Steenbeek, from APG Asset Management, told IPE: “We launched this working group because there is a real disconnect between what governments expect from private capital and what institutional investors expect from their investments.

“This report develops a comprehensive and practical framework – the ‘investible window’ – that is extremely useful for understanding how domestic institutional capital can align to public goals and priorities.

“Our hope is that this paper will provide clarity and facilitate constructive discussions on what institutional investors consider attractive and credible investment structures.”

Other pension fund executives on the working group, in addition to Betermier and Steenbeek, include Mark Lyon, deputy chief investment officer at Border to Coast Pensions Partnership; Chris Rule and Richard Tomlinson, CEO and CIO of Local Pensions Partnership Investments (LPPI), respectively; Jeffrey Hodgson, managing director, global stakeholder affairs, and Derek Walker, head of portfolio design and construction, at CPP Investments, and Ali Parker, head of investment research and strategy at TCorp in Australia.

‘Structures that money can trust’

The report – Unlocking domestic investment opportunities: Aligning public goals with pension fund realities – describes how governments will not mobilise domestic institutional capital via “patriotic appeals and mandates” but by “creating structures that money can trust”. It defines the ‘investible window’ as “the specific set of legal, financial and governance conditions that must simultaneously exist for institutional capital to flow into domestic projects while meeting fiduciary duty”.

“While the exact contours of the investible window may vary across institutions […], there is broad consistency in how institutional investors assess investment readiness,” the paper continued.

“Understanding and designing around this investible window is essential for governments and development partners seeking to attract private capital to domestic priorities.”

Last week, the Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index report highlighted how calls for pension funds to channel capital into national priorities have intensified, with the issue particularly central in the UK, where debates on investment mandates and economic growth are reshaping pension policy.

This morning, the UK government unveiled ‘Sterling 20’, a new partnership between 20 of the UK’s largest pension funds and insurers that will work with the government and City of London Corporation “to channel the nation’s savings into key infrastructure and fast-growing businesses in key modern industrial strategy sectors like AI and fintech”.

In a recent opinion piece for IPE Magnus Billing, the former CEO of Swedish pension fund Alecta, said policymakers’ productive finance push made sense, but that “[w]hen policymakers push pension funds towards higher-cost alternatives, they’re asking retirees to gamble their financial security on uncertain outcomes”. 

Founded in 2004 by Keith Ambachtsheer at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, ICPM is now a network of 54 pension funds, having last week welcomed GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, as a new member. 

You can download ICPM's report, Unlocking Domestic Investment Opportunities here.

Below, the executive summary and the working group:

 

 Among Canadians in the working group you have Eric de Roos of OTPP, Alison Loat of OPTrust, James Kwon of UPP, Bernard Morency who was formerly at La Caisse, Denes Nemeth of AIMCo, Harpinder Sandhu of BC Municipal Pension Board of Trustees and Derek Walker of CPP Investments

Canadian representation is strong and for good reason. Prime Minister Mark Carney and his government are working on getting major projects off the ground and they want Canada's large pension funds to invest in these projects.

At the heart of this report lies "The Investible Window" which provides the winning conditions for pension funds to invest more domestically:

Basically, in a nutshell, pension funds want to invest in highly scalable projects that provide competitive risk-adjusted returns, they want good governance rights and they prefer brownfield over greenfield assets, meaning an asset that is already operational and has know cash flows.

The report also explicitly states: "Benchmarking against global peers is the norm. The fact that a project is domestic is not sufficient justification for sub-commercial returns."

What does this mean in practice? It means Canada's large pension funds aren't averse to investing in large domestic projects where they have no currency risk as long as these projects are scalable and offer competitive returns relative to what they can get elsewhere.

The report offers a lot more details and provides more context but I'm boiling it down to what is critically important. 

Anyway, take the time to read the entire report here, well worth it and I certainly hope it helps bridging the disconnect between policy and practical pension investments.

If it were up to me, I'd be a bulldozer privatizing every major infrastructure asset the federal government owns and building pipelines east to west and west to east and taking anyone who opposes me to court.

Privatize airports, ports, toll roads, and a lot more and create major energy projects and invite domestic and foreign pools of capital to invest in these projects.

But first get the winning conditions right or else forget it, you're never going to go anywhere and it will be another wasted opportunity.

If I sound old and cynical, good, that's what I'm aiming for, tired of slogans and patriotic puff, actions mean a lot more than words to me.

Below, Prime Minister Carney holds a media availability during his recent visit to the United Kingdom where he met with several heads of government and business leaders and attended the Global Progress Action Summit.

Also, speaking with reporters from Canada House in London, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson recaps his three-day trip to the United Kingdom. He faces questions about the Trump administration’s recent investments in two Canadian mining companies, Chinese demand for Canadian oil, and Alberta’s push for a pipeline to British Columbia’s north coast.

Ken Sweet of the Associated Press reports regional banks' bad loans spark concerns on Wall Street:

Wall Street is concerned about the health of the nation’s regional banks, after a few of them wrote off bad loans to commercial customers in the last two weeks and caused investors to wonder if there might be more bad news to come.

Zions Bank, Western Alliance Bank and the investment bank Jefferies surprised investors by disclosing various bad investments on their books, sending their stocks falling sharply this week. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon added to the unease when he warned there might be more problems to come for banks with potentially bad loans.

“When you see one cockroach, there are probably more,” Dimon told investors and reporters on Tuesday, when JPMorgan reported its results.

The KBW Bank Index, a basket of banks tracked by investors, is down 7% this month.

There were other signs of distress. Data from the Federal Reserve shows that banks tapped the central bank’s overnight “repo” facilities for the second night in a row, an action banks have not needed to take since the Covid-19 pandemic. This facility allows banks to convert highly liquid securities like mortgage bonds and treasuries into cash to help fund their short-term cash shortfalls.

Zions Bancorp shares sank Thursday after the bank wrote off $50 million in commercial and industrial loans, while Western Alliance fell after the bank alleged it had been defrauded by an entity known as Cantor Group V LLC. This came on top of news from Jefferies, which told investors it was might experience millions of dollars in losses from its business with bankrupt auto parts company First Brands.

All three stocks recovered a bit Friday. Jefferies' CEO told investors that the company believes it was defrauded by First Brands and there were no broader concerns in the lending market.

The last banking flare up, in 2023, also involved mid-sized and regional banks that were overly exposed to low-interest loans and commercial real estate. The crisis caused Silicon Valley Bank to fail, followed by Signature Bank, and led to the eventual sale of First Republic Bank to JPMorgan Chase in a fire sale. Other banks like Zions and Western Alliance ended up seeing their stocks plummet during that time period.

While banks do fail or get bought at fire sale prices, all bank deposits are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, up to $250,000 per account, in case a of a bank failure. In the nearly 100 years since the FDIC was created in 1933, not one depositor has lost their insured funds.

Still, even the larger banks aren't immune in this latest round of trouble. Several Wall Street banks disclosed losses this week in the bankruptcy of Tricolor, a subprime auto dealership company that collapsed last month. Fifth Third Bank, a larger regional bank, recorded a $178 million loss from Tricolor’s bankruptcy.

That said, the big banks believe that any losses will be manageable and do not reflect the broader economy.

“There is no deterioration, we’re very confident with our credit portfolio,” Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing said, in an interview on Bloomberg Television on Friday.

While the big Wall Street banks get most of the media and investor attention, regional banks are a major part of the economy, lending to small-to-medium sized businesses and acting as major lenders for commercial real estate developers. There are more than 120 banks with between $10 billion and $200 billion in assets, according to the FDIC.

While big, these banks can run into trouble because their businesses are not as diverse as the Wall Street money center banks. They’re often more exposed to real estate and industrial loans, and don’t have significant businesses in credit cards and payment processing that can be revenue generators when lending goes south.

Emma Ockerman of Yahoo Finance also reports auto loan delinquencies are soaring, with consumers hit by high car prices:

American consumers are struggling under the weight of soaring auto loan debt.

Auto delinquencies are up more than 50% since 2010 and have transitioned from the safest to riskiest consumer commercial credit product in that time frame, according to a Friday report from VantageScore.

Here’s why: record-breaking car prices, higher maintenance and insurance costs, and elevated interest rates. Longer term loans are also to blame.

“The bigger picture: the auto market is a bellwether for household financial health,” the report says. “A sustained climb in auto delinquencies signals deeper affordability challenges across the consumer economy.”

The country is seeing “the most precarious consumer credit health situation since the last financial crisis,” said VantageScore Chief Economist Rikard Bandebo.

“More and more people are struggling to make ends meet,” Bandebo added.

Delinquencies among other loan categories, like credit cards and first mortgages, have declined since the first quarter of 2010, making autos a bit of an outlier, VantageScore said.

High car prices are a big culprit. The average transaction price of a new vehicle floated above $50,000 in September for the first time, likely pushed higher by luxury models and pricey electric vehicles, according to estimates from Kelley Blue Book.

Meanwhile, data released this week from Edmunds, a car shopping website, showed drivers are increasingly underwater when trading in older models for new cars, meaning their original vehicles are worth less than the amount still owed. Drivers carried more than $10,000 worth of debt in almost a quarter of upside-down trade-ins during the third quarter, for example.

Overall, Americans are carrying more than $1.66 trillion in auto debt, with borrowers tumbling into “delinquencies and defaults at a pace that exceeds pre-pandemic levels and rivals the years immediately preceding the 2008 economic crisis,” a report from the Consumer Federation of America said last month.

“We have people that are financing their car loan over eight years, which is something that we hadn’t seen since the Great Recession,” Erin Witte, the director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America, told Yahoo Finance. “Of course, when you’re extending that financing out, you’re paying more and more. And if you trade that car in before the loan term is over, you’re probably going to owe money on it, which is another cascading problem: You’re paying interest twice — it makes the next car more expensive.”

Car repossessions are also up, and the stock market is on edge after the bankruptcies of the subprime auto lender Tricolor and auto parts maker First Brands, with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon saying that "when you see one cockroach, there's probably more."

Michael Brisson, auto economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the rise in delinquencies can also be traced back to auto lenders loosening their credit standards at a time when credit scores were already broadly increasing — thanks to pandemic-era stimulus and relief programs — while car prices were ticking higher. Some consumers looked healthier than they were.

Add to this Goldman Sachs Group President John Waldron said there’s been an explosion in the growth of credit over the past decade — and that the fallout if things go south won’t be pretty.

Waldron (featured above) was quoted on CNBC as saying there isn't a private credit and public credit market, they're all related and interconnected. 

Well, DUH! If the private credit market which isn't regulated suffers a massive crisis, high yield credit spreads in public markets will blow up. Guaranteed.

In another "DUH!" moment, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon stated when it comes to credit woes,  "when you see one cockroach, there are probably more."

Many eons ago, I worked with a great guy called Matthew Pugsley at BCA who told me back then: "A bad earnings report is like a cockroach, if you see one, others will follow." 

More often than not, that is definitely the case.

As far as this week's credit woes, well, some of it is old news and some of it just confirms the US economy is slowing.

For example, auto loan delinquencies. People are losing their job and can't make payments on their car or insurance. Cars are most expensive, for sure, because of new chips that are needed to run them and that doesn't help.

America is still a tale of two economies -- the ultra rich partying in Miami, and the restless masses trying to make ends meet.

Private credit is just like any other credit,  when the economy stalls, defaults go up and if your underwriting is shoddy, guess what, you're exposed to massive losses.

As I stated recently, there are cracks in the AI and private credit bubbles. 

It doesn't mean a crisis lies straight ahead, it means there will be more negative surprises as the economy slows and markets adjust to a potential inflation boomerang.

But with the Fed cutting rates and massive fiscal stimulus coming, it feels more like 1998 than 2008.

No wonder gold futures eased on Friday but were still on pace to notch their biggest weekly gain since 2020 in a stunning rally. 

I don't get spooked by big headlines, most of which are manufactured headlines from Wall Street that wants to control the narrative.

Late Friday afternoon, the markets have all recovered nicely with exception of the Russell 2000 which remains negative.

In two weeks, President Trump will meet with his Chinese counterpart in South Korea, expect a big announcement (Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is in Malaysia next week to prepare).

We are just beginning earnings season and so far things look great with the big US banks reporting stellar numbers. 

Also, if there is a big credit crisis looming, high yield bonds would be selling off hard and they keep on rising higher:

All this to say this week there were a lot of headlines scaring algos and investors alike but there's no real tangible evidence of a looming credit crisis, at least not yet. 

Yes, we will undoubtedly hear of more private credit blowups as the US economy slows but it's still way too early to call this a systemic problem like we saw in 2008.

Anyway, here are this week's top performing and worst performing US large cap stocks (full list available here):

 

Below, Bryn Talkington, Managing Partner of Requisite Capital Management, joins CNBC's "Halftime Report" to explain why she's buying two private credit names amidst concerns in the space. The Investment Committee debate how to the risks in private credit stocks.

Next, Adam Parker, Trivariate Research founder, joins 'Closing Bell' to discuss Parker's thoughts on the credit environment, what could go wrong with capital expenditures and much more.

Third, Tom Lee, Fundstrat, joins 'Closing Bell' to discuss his take on the latest news affecting markets and why he thinks private credit woes will not change tailwinds.

Lastly, Tudor Investment Corporation's Paul Tudor Jones tells Bloomberg's Matthew Miller that if AI is a bubble, it's a historically small one. He sees concentration risk everywhere and expects to find the NASDAQ substantially higher by the end of the year.

Last week, Gillian Brown, Chief Investment Officer, Public & Private Investments, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan discussed the organization's approach to global markets, risk management and positioning for long-term growth with Bloomberg's Derek DeCloet at the 2025 Bloomberg Canadian Finance Conference in New York. 

Take the time to watch the clip below as she runs through her thoughts on private and public markets and where Teacher's is focusing its attention on and where it's not.

A lot of the stuff I covered with Gillian when we last spoke here along with CEO Jo Taylor and and CIO of Asset Allocation, Stephen McLennan. 

For example, Gillian shared this with me on private markets:

On the private asset side which is where we make the distinction in the mid-year around the performance of public markets versus private markets, the private assets were a pretty flat contributor to the portfolio this year. 

Year-to-date, clearly not what we'd like to see out of some of those asset classes. And I think it's a continuation of the story I've been telling, if I think about private equity, we've been saying it has been a very important  long-term contributor over to total fund results. We know that the industry is one in transition, that the economic environment is different than the one that created the heyday of private equity, so we need to be mindful of that in thinking about what those forward looking returns can be. 

And making sure we are thinking about our portfolio with our Portfolio Solutions group, leaning into the assets, driving the returns we want out of those assets. But on a prospective basis, how much do we want in private versus public markets, how much do we want in our internal active management programs versus what we may give to an external fund manager where we think they have competencies we may not have in those specialty focused areas.

I think it's similar to some of the issues we would have discussed a year ago at this time, just that those markets are transitioning to a different macro and political environment and private markets takes more time to adjust to some of those changes versus public markets where more quick adjustments.

Gillian had this to say on long-term value creation: “I think the question is, how do you generate returns out of private assets? For us that means focusing on the operating-company-level results.”

She basically explains how rates reset after the pandemic and why financial engineering is dead in private equity, you need a long-term value creation plan and you need to be on the deal teams from the get-go. 

She also explains why their expected returns for private equity has come down in a post-Covid world.

She also discusses why Teachers' decided to internalize international real estate because that wasn't Cadillac Fairview's "edge", it was more operating domestic office and retail properties.

Some of the more interesting remarks were on public markets where she admits OTPP and other funds cannot beat the S&P 500 especially in these markets but they still have conviction they can add excess returns in private markets over a cycle.

She also admits they lean on their external hedge fund managers to deliver some alpha over their beta exposure in public markets.

This goes back to the Ron Mock days when he told me: "beta is cheap, we can swap into any beta exposure for a few basis points and add alpha over that using external alpha providers that provide alpha we cannot generate internally."

To make a long story short, Teachers' invests roughly 10% of its assets in external hedge funds using a portable alpha structure and they try to generate T-bills + 300 bps (used to be T-bills + 500 bps). 

She discusses how they got into private credit back in 2020 during the early days of Covid using funds initially but they've been doing it for a long time but never bucketed it as an asset class.  

Lastly, she admits valuations in private markets are extended but "overheated stocks can become more overheated." They prefer playing the AI theme through private markets like electricity transmission or other AI related themes.

Anyway, take the time to listen to Gillian explain it all, she shares quite a bit and is an excellent communicator going through how they approach private and public markets.