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What Is an Operating Partner in Private Equity? The Operator's Guide (2026)
What the role actually is when the slide deck hits the portfolio company: definition, deal-stage duties, the five flavours, pay, and where the role is heading.
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Value Creation
What Is a NAV Loan? A Plain-English Guide to NAV Financing in Private Equity (2026)
Funds are borrowing against their whole portfolio to manufacture cash. How it actually works, and who carries the risk.
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Continuation Fund vs Traditional Exit: When Private Equity Holds Instead of Sells (2026)
A continuation fund lets a PE firm sell an asset to itself instead of to a third party. How it compares to a traditional exit, when each is the honest choice, and the operator's tells for which one you are really in.
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The Best Private Equity Newsletters in 2026
A categorised, honest guide to the best private equity newsletters in 2026, grouped by role: daily deal flow, institutional trade reads, operator-focused newsletters, and commentary.
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The PE-Backed CFO Tenure Squeeze: Why 2.5 Years Is the New Normal in 2026
The average tenure of a Chief Financial Officer at a private-equity-backed company in 2026 is 2.5 years. That is roughly half the 5.6-year average for public-company CFOs, and it means a typical portfolio company runs through two CFOs during a 5-year hold period.
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Ares built the boring machine.
No insurance balance sheet. No synthetic spread income. No great mystical sermon about permanent capital while someone quietly bolts an annuity book onto the back of the firm. Just fees. From 2014 to 2025, Ares took fee-related earnings from roughly $150m to $1.8bn. Over the same period, realized
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Most operating partners fail because the firm set them up to fail.
Operating partners do not usually fail because they lack skill. They fail because nobody gave them authority, air cover, or a mandate anyone in the business actually respects. That is a very different problem. Private equity loves the idea of the operating partner. It sounds serious. Hands on. Value creation
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Carlyle is a useful reminder that most private equity firms are still private equity firms.
That sounds obvious, but it matters. The biggest alternative asset managers have spent the last decade making the model less dependent on the traditional private equity cycle. Insurance. Credit. Permanent capital. Spread earnings. Balance sheet scale. All very clever, all very useful, all slightly funny when the industry still calls
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Partners Group just built a product for the exit market nobody trusts.
Last week it launched its new Total Return Strategy: control private equity, lower leverage, up to 12-year holds, mid-teens gross return targets, and an initial annual dividend yield of roughly 5 to 8%. In other words, actual cash flow. Disgusting behaviour. Someone alert the IRR police. The interesting
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KKR’s insurance strategy looks boring on purpose.
Which is usually where the money is hiding. In 2021, KKR bought Global Atlantic. At the time, it looked like another sensible adjacency. Asset manager buys insurance balance sheet, gets permanent capital, originates credit, collects spread. Everyone nods politely and pretends they were already saying it. Then the numbers started
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What happens to private equity in a "Carry Winter"?
A carry winter is going to make private equity very weird. Not dead. Not broken. Just weird. For years, the industry has talked about DPI, exit backlogs, continuation vehicles, NAV loans and LP liquidity as if they are mainly investor issues. They are not. They are compensation issues. And compensation
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Apollo is no longer just an alternative asset manager.
It is an insurance company with a private equity costume department. That sounds glib, but the chart is doing something useful. For years, Apollo looked like the classic alts model. Fees grinding along underneath. Carry bouncing around like a drunk analyst after bonus day. Great when markets are open. Less