News
Blue Owl carried Loparex near par in December. It is pennies now.
From par to five cents in nine months, and the borrower has not even filed. Our read on what one small credit says about a $1.8 trillion market's marks.
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Deals
Apollo's $20 billion for DePuy Synthes is roughly what J&J paid for Synthes alone.
Bloomberg says Apollo is in talks to buy J&J's orthopaedics business for close to $20 billion. In 2012 J&J paid $19.7 billion for Synthes, and DePuy was not included.
Deals
History's largest buyout closed five weeks ago. Its owner is already rearranging it.
PIF took EA private on 4 August for $55 billion, the largest leveraged buyout ever completed. Five weeks later it is weighing whether EA should be folded into the gaming platform it already owned.
Views
The pay gap narrows after a buyout. The expensive people leave.
A Journal of Finance paper finds buyouts narrow pay gaps inside the firm, raise profitability and raise employment. The compression comes from replacing expensive managers with cheaper ones.
What Is Rollover Equity in Private Equity? Definition, Mechanics, and What It Does to a Management Team
Rollover equity is the slice of a seller's proceeds reinvested in the buyer's NewCo instead of paid in cash. How it works with a $100M example, where it sits in the preference stack, how it differs from a MIP, and what it does to a founder's behaviour during the hold.
Commercial Due Diligence vs Marketing Due Diligence: What Each One Actually Answers (2026)
Commercial diligence asks whether the market is real. Marketing diligence asks whether the demand is real, and who owns it. What each one covers, when it runs, who does it, and which one your deal needs.
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The CEO replacement rate is not a talent problem.
Nearly 70% of PE-backed CEOs get replaced during the average hold period. That statistic should make the industry more uncomfortable than it does. Most people hear it and conclude that portfolio company CEOs are the problem. Wrong lens. If the selection process keeps producing the same failure pattern, perhaps
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The executive search industry is consolidating around a very simple fear.
The old model is getting squeezed. AI is compressing research. Clients are getting more price sensitive. Private equity wants faster replacements. Boards want more advice, more data, more benchmarking, more comfort blankets with logos on them. So every SHREK firm is making a different bet. Spencer Stuart is turning board
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Model addiction is what happens when deal teams confuse precision with understanding.
The spreadsheet goes to three decimal places. The customer research goes to lunch. Every PE firm has a model. Revenue growth. Margin expansion. Working capital improvement. Synergy capture. Exit multiple. Lovely little tabs. Very obedient colours. A base case, a downside case, and a fantasy case wearing sensible shoes. Then
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Korn Ferry is the last publicly traded SHREK firm standing.
Which mostly tells you that it stopped being a pure executive search firm before the market fully noticed. FY25 revenue was $2.7 billion. Executive search is now only 35% of the business. The other 65% comes from consulting, digital, assessment, professional search and RPO. Translation, the retained search market
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Fundraising decks are expensive fiction with compliance review.
I enjoy fundraising decks in the same way I enjoy estate agent descriptions. Compact means tiny. Charming means structurally questionable. Proprietary means everyone else has seen it but did not love the price. Private equity has its own dialect. "Proprietary deal flow" often means the company came through
Deals
Warburg bought a foundry for $459 million. Its customer just paid $11.75 billion.
GE Aerospace bought castings from CPP for fifteen years. It just paid 26 times EBITDA to stop. Warburg reportedly paid $459 million in 2011.