The Myth of Private Equity | Jeffrey C. Hooke | Talks at Google

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[MUSIC PLAYING] [APPLAUSE] JEFFERY C. HOOKE: It's obviously a pleasure to be here. I'm going to start off by taking a poll. How many people have heard the fairy tale "Jack and the Beanstalk?" OK, most of you. Well, as you recall from that fairy tale, Jack was asked by his mother to take the family cow to the market and sell it. Instead, he was waylaid along the way to the market by someone who offered to exchange magic beans for the cow. And those magic things were supposed to translate into great wealth for Jack and his mother. So in that particular case, as you recall from the fairy tale, the magic beans did return wealth. He had to steal gold from the giant way up above. But it did result in wealth for Jack and his mom. But when we talk about private equity, they have the same system. They're promising a magic elixir, or magic beans for investors-- that they're going to beat the stock markets dramatically. And as we're going to learn today, it simply isn't the case. And that's why the subject of this talk is called the Myth of Private Equity. So I like to start off a talk by telling you exactly what we're going to go over. So we've got six topics today. We've got my background. What is private equity? Is it a savior for institutional investors that want to beat the stock market? We'll talk a little bit as [? Pernesh ?] indicated about private equity returns and the associated fees. And then we'll close with, how do big institutions select a private equity fund? And then I'll take some questions. So my background is a little unusual. I've had a number of different positions. I was an investment banker in New York for 15 years. I was an institutional lender both in New York and at the World Bank in Washington, DC. I've done private equity in the emerging markets for a very large private equity fund as well as for the World Bank's private equity operation. As he pointed out, I'm an author. I've also been an expert witness in front of judges regarding financial matters. And as he pointed out, I'm currently a professor of finance. So I've had quite a number of different positions. Deal-wise, I've done deals all over the world. I've done US. I've done deals in Asia, Latin America, Europe. There probably isn't a deal that I haven't seen-- M&A, IPOs, large debt offerings, project finance. I've kind of seen it all in my career. And that's led me to look at things in various ways because I've been exposed to so many different transactions as well as different cultures-- how people in various countries and various institutions look at transactions in corporate finance. So I've had sort of an intellectual bent, which you don't see with a lot of Wall Street-type people. And so I kind of analyze things. I don't think it's necessarily helped my career much, but it's been interesting. And of course, you've maybe heard the expression, the unreflected life is not worth living. So I guess I've lived by that motto. Some books-- as he pointed out, Wall Street-type books-- but I've done some academic work lately as a professor. And the professors that I've worked with, we've done papers on private equity, state pension funds, and we just finished a paper that's going to be published by a journal on private foundations and their investment techniques. I do a lot of pro bono work. If you don't know what pro bono means, it means free. It's Latin for free. Because I have quite an investment banking and finance background, I've done work for citizens groups and taxpayer groups in these four areas-- tobacco lawsuit fees, which ran into the billions, like, 15 or 20 years ago. Casino legalization in various states-- Many of the legislators wanted to give these casinos licenses out for free. I thought it was wrong. I thought it was un-American. So I led a fight to try to get these states to charge quote, "fair market value" for these licenses. And we had some success. It probably cost the casino industry $2 or $3 billion in fees. Public utility mergers, where the utilities aren't giving enough of their benefits of the merger to the ratepayers-- and then, as I said, I've also done, not only academic research, but some testimony on behalf of state pension funds and investors and employee unions to see that those things are run properly. My pro bono work also extends to the CFA society. I'm a big fan of the CFA Institute. And so when I do travel-- sometimes on vacation, sometimes on business-- if I have enough advanced notice, I'll contact the local CFA Society. It's a global organization, so I've been in front of audiences in places, like Moscow and Thailand. So it's been kind of interesting there as well. I know some of you are in the Investment Club here at Google. Investment Club often means, I like to buy stocks and sell stocks. So I'll talk of a couple of words about stock picking based on my experience. Tens of thousands of people are involved in the picking of stocks. And many are extremely well-trained at the top business schools and have a lot of experience. So if you're picking stocks personally, you remember, you've got a lot of competition to be right and, actually, to beat the market. So even with all these smart people doing it, it's very tough to beat the market. Most professionals can't do it. And these people are working 24/7 trying to beat the market. They just can't do it. Those that can consistently beat the market, it's a very small percentage. If you look at fund managers going up against the S&P 500, less than 0.1% have beaten it over the last 10 years consistently. So they have the rare combination of extreme ability and luck. And if you look at statistically, if you're guessing, buy or sell for 10 years, if that's a binary choice, the chances of being right for 10 years are 1 in 1,000. So it's tough, tough to beat the market. I think it's a good hobby, so I do it, even though I don't think my results are that terrific. I think it's a good hobby. It's easy to measure your performance against the market. It's objective like being a baseball hitter or something. But if you are someone like the people in this room, you probably have a job that's full time. You're not going to be able to really research stocks effectively against the pros. So I would say reserve part of your portfolio for fun stock picking, but index most of it. So let's get to the topic of today's talk, which is private equity and why it's a myth. I'll describe private equity for a minute. So the way a private equity fund works is, you have a number of large institutional investors-- 10 or 15, sometimes 20-- putting in tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars into a fund. So it's a big pot of money. And the fund is run by investment banker-types like myself. And so the fund is buying companies for the most part. And it's going to have a portfolio of, say, 5 or 10 companies. And then these companies are then going to be sold after a certain holding period. So it's like a mutual fund, except the number of investments is very small, and you control each one. So the fund is actually in control and helps guide the company. So the interesting thing I find about private equity as opposed to, say, a mutual fund is that the investors have a much longer time horizon. So if you're going to buy companies and then sell them, first, you have to find them. So finding a deal, in itself, is a full-time job, believe me. Then you have to negotiate and close the transaction. So if you've got a fund of, say, $1 billion, that's going to take three or four years to invest that $1 billion. Then, over the next few years, you're trying as a PE fund manager to work with the management teams of these various companies that you own. You're trying to improve the company. Much like if you buy a piece of real estate, you may say, well, I'm going to paint it. I'm going to put an addition on it, and then I'll flip it. So they're trying to do the same thing. Except, in a corporate world, where they've got a few years to try to improve the earnings of the company, improve the sales and then get the company ready for sale. Get this company ready for sale and liquidation. So then they've got three or four years after the holding period to sell the company. Now, most of them are sold in M&A deals. There are very few IPOs in the United States. There's only a few hundred every year, where there's 15,000 M&A deals every year. So then they sell the companies at the end of 10 years, and hopefully, the investors have got a good profit. So if you look at it in the narrow stock-picking way, these managers are picking companies almost like you might pick stocks in a portfolio. So they're very concentrated, but they're essentially picking stocks, except they're buying the whole company. So that's the way they do it. Now, this chart doesn't show it, but there are three categories that dominate private equity. The largest one would be Leveraged Buyouts, and I'll talk about that in a minute. Venture capital and growth equity would be about 20%. But LBOs would be over 60% of the money. And what's a Leveraged Buyout? Well, a leveraged buyout fund-- it's got a basic strategy here, which is you buy 5 or 10 low-tech companies. They have to be non-cyclical, and they have to be profitable. So they can borrow a lot of money. Banks like loaning to firms that make money. And so the idea is that the LBO will have a lot more debt than a similar publicly-traded company like those in the Russell 2000. And the idea, very basically, is that the more debt you put on a conservatively managed low-tech company, the lower the cost of capital. If the market goes up, the stock market goes up, as does the M&A market at the same pace, the internal rate of return of the private equity portfolio will be greater than a similar portfolio of publicly-traded stocks because it has more debt. More debt would mean higher rate of return to the equity holder. Of course, if the stock market falls, the reverse happens. So you will have more losses compared to the public market if you've got a lot of leverage. So the private equity fund, in theory, should have more volatility. It should go up and down more than the stock market because of the greater debt. But the returns will be enhanced either up or down. Now, venture capital funds-- you know, we're here in Silicon Valley-- venture capital is a little different. But it's the same principle. You buy 5 or 10 Venture Capital investments. There, usually the private equity fund or the VC fund is not controlling the company. They don't own a majority interest. They're buying companies that are already in business for the most part. So they're not working out of a garage or something. And not all the VC investments are high tech. So here, the companies are a lot younger than the buyout business. So the VC partners are providing not only cash, but some guidance and advice. So it's a little different than the LBO business because I think there's more involvement with the management team. So the fundamental objective of the private equity industry is they'd like to beat the stock market. Because if they're not beating the stock market, the investors-- big institutions, like Harvard, or Singapore Sovereign Wealth Fund-- will say, what do I need you for? I can just buy public stocks. So the idea is to have a higher rate of return with less risk. That's the sales pitch. So if you look at that sales pitch, it would put the private equity business at a higher rate of return the S&P 500 with lower risk. Now, some of you may remember, if you ever took a finance course, that that defies all finance theory back from the '50s. Supposedly, if you're higher than this market line, the market will come in. Everybody will invest in this and, therefore, drive the returns down to what's on the securities market line, it's called. So that's the theory. So it contradicts the theory. A lot of PE investors are saying, not only do I want to have the S&P return from my Private Equity fund, I want to beat it. And that's because you can't sell these funds. You can't sell your part of a private equity fund like you can sell stocks. And you're also not getting instant feedback on what the price of your private equity portfolio is, because there's some uncertainty about what a private company is worth. So there are thousands of funds out there. As I said, I used to work for one. And the idea from the fund manager's perspective is, I want to start fund one-- getting the fees from the investors and hopefully getting profits-- and then, while this fund is four or five years old, I'll start the next one. I don't need a lot of extra management to start a new fund. So I'll start this fund next, get these from that while I'm selling part of one. And then, as fund two starts getting invested, I'll go to fund three. So I'm compounding the profits, and I've got economies of scale with the management. Now, as I said, it'd be nice if investors could beat the market with these funds. And earlier, they were. Say, before 2005, as you can see, the funds that were started before that were consistently beating the S&P 500. But people then started plunging into these funds. Because these funds got much bigger, there was more competition for deals. And so, as you might expect, when there's more competition for transactions, the cost of the M&A goes up. And the returns, as a result, declines. So over the last 12 years or so, the returns have not been very good relative to the S&P 500. And if you look, this is buyout funds. If you look at venture capital, there's a similar return pattern where people were piling into these funds, and so the returns have not been so terrific. So if you look at fees as one element of the whole private equity equation, they're pretty high. So the fees on an indexed mutual fund that you might buy from Vanguard or Fidelity might be five basis points a year. They're peanuts, almost nothing. And in fact, there's been some news that Fidelity is starting to offer funds for nothing. So you would invest in it and not pay anything. Private equity, on the other hand, is about 300 basis points a year. So the fees are 60 times as great. So the manager of the private equity fund has got to beat the S&P by 3% every year just to compensate the investors for the fee. So that's pretty tough. And so if you look at it like this kind of graph, getting into this part of performance is so hard. Just a small percentage of people can do that with the public markets. And as a result, with the high fee drag, you're not investing the investor's money 100%. Perhaps, the private equity fund's only investing 80% of investor's money. So there's a lot of hurdles that the PE fund has got to conquer to try to beat the stock market. And I looked at one fund. A lot of states, a lot of universities, and a lot of big institutions don't know what their carry fees are. They don't ask. So they're not billed for a carry fee. The fees are deducted before the investors see their returns. The only fee that is disclosed in an accounting way as 1.8%. So unless the state or the university asks, they don't get the carry fee. New Jersey is one of the few states that actually asks. So I just put that up here on the slide. It shows you the fees are about 3% last year. Now, the interesting thing about private equity funds is the performance-- for the positive, performance is really dominated by the top quartile, which means the top 25% of funds do very well. The second quartile is around the stock market, and the third and fourth are below. So you've got half the people that don't have a very good batting average. And if you look at venture capital, the chart would be very, kind of, similar. The interesting thing about those performance numbers is that a lot of the performance numbers are based on transactions that haven't been sold yet. In other words, the PE firm has bought the company-- hasn't sold it yet. So how are they measuring their performance? Well, they have the ability to mark to market their own investments. Nobody's really double-checking. Like the auditors, the investors, the limited partners do not check. It's sort of an honor system that always surprised me. Maybe I'm a little hard-bitten and cynical. But it surprised me that trillions of dollars going in, and nobody's really checking it. So I liken the whole process to a third grader grading their own homework, which is a little strange for this kind of business. So here's the evidence. So if you look at buyout funds, these are, like, 10 years ago. And this is statistics-- are reasonably recent. You can see, even, like, 2010, 2011, most of the returns that they're vouching for haven't happened yet in terms of cash. Now, these deals haven't been sold. So you've got funds that are seven, eight, nine years old that haven't sold half the stuff they own yet. So I question a little bit whether they're worth as much as the managers say they are. So if you want to get a little more into the weeds, are they really worth as much as they said? I did a study with one of my colleagues. And we looked at what was the market experience in the crash? You would expect a company with more leverage, like the portfolio companies of a leveraged buyout fund to decline more than the stock market for the reasons I mentioned earlier. But if you look at the way they reported it, the leveraged buyout industry said, guess what? Our results were better than the stock market, despite our higher leverage. So that, again, would strike me as being totally the opposite of what finance theory would tell you. So we call that-- "return smoothing" is the expression. So you have the flexibility to put your own markings on your portfolio. You're obviously going to do it a little slightly in your favor, if you're a rational person, to make yourself look better. Of course, as I said, the sales pitch is, not only do we have higher returns in the stock market, but we're also less volatile. Anyway, the sales pitch has made believers out of a lot of big institutions. And so I looked, again with one of my colleagues-- we looked at pension fund returns to the big states, like California, New York, Maryland. We looked at their pension funds. And they've made a much larger dedication to alternative assets like private equity funds, hedge funds. But that stampede into private equity and other alternatives has not really provided a higher level of return. So if you just compare your average state pension fund or endowment with a 60/40 index that you can buy from Vanguard or Fidelity, there's a big difference if 60/40 outperforms that by a significant margin. People that aren't really acquainted with math say, well, it's only 1%. What's the big deal? But if you're running a $50 billion pension, and it's 1% every year, that's $500 million a year. Sooner or later, you're talking some serious cash. So how do these institutions, how do they pick the private equity funds? They're trying to do their best. They're trying to find ones that are in the top quartile. How do they do it? So there's two ways they do it. One is they look at a fund that was in the top quartile previously. So that fund is coming out with, let's say, fund number two. So the investor would say, OK, they did well in fund number one. I presume they'll repeat the performance in fund number two or fund number three, in this case. So what is the statistical probability of the third or the second fund beating the prior fund? It's about 30%. So it's almost random. So that, in Wall Street terms, that's called mean reversion. You may be doing well for a while, but then, gradually, as time goes on, you revert to the average. You're the same as everybody else. So with LBOs, it's about 30%. So it's almost random. With VC, there seems to be more staying power. VC firms are more adept at repeating their performance. Now that's one option. So you try to go to your top-quartile funds, and hope they repeat the performance. Unfortunately, most of them don't. So what about option number B? That would be where you say, I'm just going to play it safe. I'm going to pick a big brand-name fund. I'll go with Goldman, or Carlyle Group, or Kohlberg Kravis. They've got six or seven funds. There's a history. They're big names. I'll just invest in them. The problem with that is that if you look at the big-fund families, like Carlyle, or Apollo, or KKR, they don't outperform the no-name fund. So strategy A or B doesn't seem to be a good option. B, obviously gives the people at the pension fund or the endowment some air cover. They can always say, well, it wasn't my fault that the fund screwed up. I went with Goldman Sachs. They're supposed to know what they're doing. So there's the old saying, you can't get fired by going with IBM. It would be the same thing in the private equity business. Portfolio patterns-- how does it look with these funds? If you've got 10 companies in a fund, like a leveraged buyout, you've got about three that will go bankrupt because of the high debt. Sometimes it doesn't work out when you borrow a lot of money. Four will be OK in terms of returns. Three will be, as the saying goes, home runs where it might be a 20% or 30% rate of return. The VCs are a little different. There, it's more of a crapshoot. You're dealing with younger companies. A lot of times they're technology, so they're undeveloped. The customer base in technology are not known. So you've got a lot more bankruptcies. When they do hit a premium return, it could be very high, just big returns on, say, a boring, low-tech company in the buyout business. Couple of case studies for those of you that are interested in venture capital. I'm sure you've all heard of this one-- Theranos. I guess, once you get on "Forbes" magazine, that's, like, the end of it. I always used to think, when some CEO writes a book, the stock is going to tank. Because I've seen so many instances where there's a book come out, and then the stock of the company tanks. This story is kind of well-known. She invented the-- what people thought was an exclusive technology to do blood tests just pricking your finger instead of getting a needle in your arm. And people were buying the story, put in hundreds of millions of dollars from very knowledgeable Silicon Valley investors. She got a lot of publicity. Most of it was pretty good. The value of the company on a private basis went all the way up to $9 billion until the roof caved in when the "Journal" started picking up rumors that the technology really wasn't what she and others said it was. And of course, the company, I guess, just announced it was liquidating a couple of weeks ago. So the investors and the equity were totally wiped out. What about a good one? Why talk about bad? Let's talk about a good one. There are many good ones. Roku is a real success story. So it's about 10 years old. They invented the first streaming box for Netflix. And then they developed some other products and went the normal process that you'd like to see for a high-tech company of raising VC and gradually getting a higher value and then going public at a big number. And everybody got a terrific rate of return. Now Roku is still losing money despite all this success. So we're just going to have to wait and see in a few years if it turns out to be a real solid business entity that can sustain its momentum. So you might say, why do people still invest? Why do big institutions invest in private equity? Haven't they seen these statistics? Well, I'm a little bit of a student of human nature. And I've come up with a few theories about it, having talked to many people. So I think one category of investor may be a true optimist. People always like to think they can do better than the stock market. They're saying, I think I've got a plan that we can do better, and I think private equity is the way to go. So these would be the true believers. And I was doing some work on behalf of New Jersey employee unions. And I was looking at the private equity portfolio. And I remember hearing the head of the investment committee talk. And he's saying, Mr. Hooke doesn't know anything. We only invest in the top quartile private equity funds. They invested in 100 different funds, and I looked at them. And I looked at their performance on a private equity database. And they weren't top quartile. They weren't bottom, but they weren't top. If you took all 100 together, they were exactly in the middle. They were doing, say, between the second and the third quartile, which is what you'd expect if you selected the funds at random. But you have these people that simply believe that. Now, the other group would be institutional investors that listen to their consultants a lot. So every big pension fund-- most endowments will have a consultant that would tell them, here's the portfolio allocation you have. You should allocate some to stocks, some to bonds, and some to alternatives. So they're always pushing alternatives, these consultants. And so if you listen to them, you're going to be in alternatives yourself. Now a cynic might say, why are they pushing alternatives if they have seen these statistics? Well, if you are consultant, you're getting paid millions of dollars a year, why would they continue paying you if you just walked into the office and said, I think you should index the whole portfolio? Well, then they say, well, what do we need you for? C is the one I think is probably the most applicable. And it's unfortunate. But if you're working at a big endowment, or if you're working at a big state pension fund, you're in the investment office. You have a job of picking managers usually. So you're not investing the money yourself. But you're picking managers in stocks, or bonds, or hedge funds, or private equity. So it's unlikely that you are going to look at all the numbers and say, well, our strategy is wrong. We screwed it up to last 10 years because we're not beating a 60/40. Those people's jobs are dependent on having a lot of different investments to manage and supervise. So if they were to walk into the board of directors office and say, we can't produce any premium return over an index so I, therefore, hand in my resignation. Not many people are going to do that. In finance, that's called an agency problem where the investors are using the managers as agents, hoping to get a good return. And the last one is really what I call the Stockholm syndrome. The Stockholm syndrome is based on people, like, 20 or 30 years ago that were kidnapped by a gang in Stockholm, Sweden. And so over time, as they were kept captive, they started sympathizing with their kidnappers, believing what the kidnappers told them. And it was kind of a very interesting psychological experiment or situation. So if you talk to people in the business, many of them go to conferences, and they're all talking about how great private equity is or hedge fund. And so if you hang around people, and they talk about this stuff, you start to believe it. That might be the fourth theory. But again, as I said, I think probably C might be the overriding theory of why we still see a lot of private equity. I like to tell my classes at the university, private equity M&A is a business for optimists. So you have to think you're going to do better than the average. And human nature tends to be, in many cases, optimistic. And that's the investment business in a nutshell. If you think you can get higher returns, you're going to be an optimist relative to many others. So there's a little bit of a circular facet to this where you've got the claims of the PE funds. And they basically can, as I said, mark to market their own businesses. Many PE fees are secret, so people don't know what the states are paying. Accounting doesn't require that the fees be disclosed. So it's a self-perpetuating circle, and it's been very effective. That's why, if you believe in the efficient market theory, you'd say, well, wait a second. Time out. There shouldn't be a private equity industry as big as it is. But the market's not quite efficient, because the information simply isn't out there for many of the investors. So on that note, I will stop and take a few questions. Anybody have a question they'd like to ask? AUDIENCE: Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate the talk. I was wondering if you had the same sort of view towards private equity funds that, say, that they specialize in a particular asset class like real estate or infrastructure funds versus, I guess-- well, yeah, do you have any thoughts about those types of funds, how they compare to funds that are purchasing businesses, like LBOs versus, we invest in roads or whatever? JEFFERY C. HOOKE: Sure. Well, infrastructure funds are kind of too new to be analyzed in that way where you can look at a long-term track record. The other problem with infrastructure funds is there tends to be no public equivalent that's easily definable in the same way as a private Infrastructure fund. So that would be a tough one. Real estate, on the other hand, has a long track record. So private real estate funds would do roughly the same as publicly-traded REITs, Real Estate Investment Trusts that are publicly-traded vehicles that buy real estate. I haven't done a whole lot of study on this. But if you look at private real estate funds, they also tend to be less volatile than publicly-traded REITs, which has raised some questions about their mark to market ability. AUDIENCE: I think I'm pretty [INAUDIBLE].. JEFFERY C. HOOKE: [? Pernesh, ?] you got one here? Go ahead. AUDIENCE: So I noticed that there were folks like Ray [INAUDIBLE] and whatnot-- the fact that they kind of double-dip-- they're in the VC world, and they're also in PE-- what is that called when they do both, or they kind of play around in both worlds? JEFFERY C. HOOKE: Well, it's clear these folks are running a business, right? They're running a business to obviously benefit their investors. But also, they've got to benefit themselves as the owners of the business or the PE fund. So the trend for the larger ones is, we've done about all we can in VC. We can't grow much bigger in that market, because there just aren't enough good investments. So it's not unusual that they say, well, some of the skills are very similar to private equity. So we'll take what we've learned in venture capital and transfer it to growth equity or, maybe not buyouts, but growth equity. And I agree with them. I think there are a lot of similarities-- deal closing, evaluation of companies, evaluation of management and markets. So it's a natural progression. And you've seen some of the bigger buyout firms, not only go into growth capital-- not so much venture capital-- but you see them going into hedge funds. You see them going into lending, where they say, well, we've done a lot of buyout deals as an equity investor. We can also do lending. So it's just diversifying your business makes the patterns of earnings more stable and predictable. AUDIENCE: I was wondering if you know any differences in, say, attitude for investing in cultures, for example, in other countries, like Asia, versus the United States? JEFFERY C. HOOKE: I got into Asia quite a bit. I think you've got to distinguish between retail investors and institutions. If you go to retail in Asia, I think they're much more interested in speculation. Here, I think investors, even the retail tend to be more analytically inclined. And they might study the PE ratio of the company, and how does it compare to others, and what's the growth record, and all that sort of thing. But I think the Asian retail investor will be saying, oh, I heard it's a hot stock, and they go and buy it-- not do much analysis. Not that they don't do that here in the States and Europe, but I think they'd be a little more on the speculative side. Institutionally, I haven't noticed much difference between, say, a big Chinese sovereign wealth fund and, say, a big university. I think they tend to travel in the same circles, and they sort of do the similar investing techniques. See you later, Kurt. AUDIENCE: Hi, Jeff. Thanks for the talk. Just riffing off the previous question, if you said the retail investors in certain countries or locations tend to be more whimsical or so, have you seen, in your studies, a correlation, we would say, of PE being successful in some areas versus not-- some emerging markets versus-- there are these compounding factors that basically make them any bit more successful or not? JEFFERY C. HOOKE: Well, there are PE in lots of emerging markets now. But it's a relatively new phenomenon. Private equity in, say, India, or Malaysia, or South Africa-- I don't think there's enough data points really to measure it, whether they have PE funds in emerging markets have beaten the ones-- I shouldn't say-- where they've beaten the stock markets in those countries. I just don't think there's enough information there. AUDIENCE: Thank you for the lecture. I couldn't help but note the-- you presented a great slide, which was the history of performance relative to the S&P or was it a 60/40? I wasn't quite clear which. And it seemed fairly clear that it was working relative to the S&P for a good while and then stopped. Do you have any theories about why that is? JEFFERY C. HOOKE: Yeah, of course, I do. Sure. I wouldn't be here if I didn't. I've talked to a bunch of people in the business about it. I think, when there was a lot of success, as this chart points out, investors just started buying into these funds based on their historical track record. And so as I sort of suggested, as people pile into these funds, the prices for the targets-- because there's only so many targets out there that fit the requirements to be a buyout candidate, for example-- so the price of the targets, therefore, went up. So as the price of the targets goes up, the corresponding return to the LBO investor drops a little. It doesn't go to zero, but it drops a little. And so the difference, you can see, is illustrated by here. Once people started looking at this track record, they got-- '05, '06, '07 were some of the biggest years for new funds. So there's a lot of competition for deals. And I noticed that because I am part time at an investment bank. And I see the competition for transactions where, for an LBO candidate, we might get six, seven offers. So who's the winner? The one that offers the higher price. Of course, the winner, then, could be the loser as they're paying too high a price. So you've got supply-demand because there's so much money trying to find the same transaction. The other aspect would be the fees. The fees are just high. So if you've got a pretty high fee level, that's just going to be a drag on the return. Any other questions? I got one over here. AUDIENCE: Similar to that point, in the last few years, there's been a lot of discussion about the value-- just [INAUDIBLE] index funds and go that route. And so a lot of money is flooding that way now. And do you anticipate that there's any type of similar kind of effect that was actaully had when you saw the returns on PE was great. A lot of money came that way and, eventually, then the returns aren't there? Is there any potential the same thing's happening on the index side now that people are just investing their equity into index funds? JEFFERY C. HOOKE: I think, at some point, if there's too much money going into index funds, then there's going to be more opportunities for stock pickers-- people that study and then pick individual stocks. Because so many passive funds will misprice. They're just buying stuff based on market cap. But if you look at the retail market for mutual funds, it's about 30% indexed. And institutionally, big pools of money like pension funds, or endowments, or universities, I think the indexing is only around 15, so it's small. So when I've thought about it and talked with people, whose opinions I respect, I think the indexing part can probably go to 75% or 80% before indexing returns will then be beat by those people that aren't indexing. So there's a long way to go, long way to go. The other thing is that-- perhaps I should correct myself-- there are a lot of people managing money that do what's called closet indexing. So they're running a big large cap fund for some money manager or some state pension fund. So they're trying to conform their results to the large cap index. So they are, in effect-- even though they claim they're picking stocks and doing all kinds of analysis-- they're trying to stay close to what the stocks are in the index so that they won't outperform or underperform it by any meaningful amount. So that's a very conservative strategy, you might say. But I think, if you include closet indexing-- my percentages, you maybe double them for what's indexed right now. Over here. AUDIENCE: Thank you for the talk, Jeff. I have a question. So do you think the competition from the private equity actually leaked or affect the public market? For example, for the recent year, it seems the price of the IPO or the valuation of the IPO is pretty high, and there's not much juice out of the IPO. So is that part of it? JEFFERY C. HOOKE: So the question is, is the private equity market competing with the public market for new listings? I'd say, absolutely. You have a lot of companies that you'd think would be a good IPO candidates. And they're saying there's so much private equity money out there, why should I do an IPO? Because it's a pain in the neck to be a public company. You've got everything laid out there for everybody to read about. You've got so many regulatory matters you have to address. Everything that you talk about on TV or in press releases can be microscoped by a lawyer. So for many companies, I think it's a better idea to go private equity. So there's so much private equity, I think they're really retarding the number of IPOs. And I don't see that process slowing down. I personally, would like to see more IPOs so public investors have a shot at getting into a lot of growth companies. But right now, there's just too much private equity money available. And I'm sure you see it here in Silicon Valley a lot. You see a good little company and say, well, gee, that's a good IPO candidate. But it's just not happening. The other factor, which you often hear mentioned, is that the investment banking community has shrunk considerably. So now you probably have 5 or 10 firms that really dominate the business. And they would dominate IPOs as well. So they tend to want to see bigger deals. They're big companies. It's economical for them to do large IPOs. So with the demise of many smaller banks who got acquired or just closed, you don't see as many smaller deals. There just aren't enough people to sell them. So you've got those two factors, I think, working against the public market-- having more listings, at least for now. AUDIENCE: Thank you. AUDIENCE: I have a general question about valuation, since you've written such a great book. During the Graham times, there was a lot of focus on price to book. And then the world moved on as the economy changed and the nature of businesses changed to looking at P/E ratios and price to free cash flows. Do you think there's yet another paradigm shift, or this is more where a good idea is taken to an extreme, which of the two it is where you have a very intangible economy. Customers acquired now, whose values are realized over the long time, and PE doesn't reflect that economics? JEFFERY C. HOOKE: Well, you remember when Graham and Dodd wrote that book, we were just getting over a huge stock market crash. And so the book was ultra conservative saying-- it focused heavily on the balance sheet. That's your backup plan. If you had a strong balance sheet, it's unlikely that the company could go bankrupt. So that was sort of their starting point. Look at the balance sheet, then let's look at the income statement. So now, it's reversed. People are looking much more at the income statement. And I guess that's been pretty much the fashion for the last 30 years. And that's sort of what my book was-- sort of an update of the Graham and Dodd authoritative book. And I don't think the paradigm has really changed. I think people today are still focusing on, as you kind of pointed out, cash flow, EBITDA, not looking at the balance sheet much unless it's, say, a financial institution, like a bank or an insurance company. What I think has been noticeable the last few years-- and this is sort of a repeat of, say, '99, '98, 2000-- is people are more willing to take a flyer on companies that have a good sales progression without earnings. So they've got good sales. Earnings are going to come later. And I think, now is sort of a repeat of, say, 20 years ago. And I think people have learned their lesson. They're probably being a little more analytical about it than they were 20 years ago-- the last internet boom. But I'm still a little cautious about it. I'm still a little reluctant to advocate buying the stock of companies that have huge losses, even though they are gathering customers that could make a return in the future for the business. Yeah? AUDIENCE: I guess maybe what I was trying [? to-- ?] on a more unit economic basis in the last dot-com bubble. Probably the companies were not profitable, even on a unit economics versus today. One could argue that, sure, they're losing money, but that's because the fixed costs right now is very high. But on unit economics, they're still very profitable. And if they got the scale, then those fixed costs may be covered. Obviously, it's risky to know whether they [? got ?] to the scale or not. JEFFERY C. HOOKE: No. You're absolutely right. Once you've got the fixed costs in place for a lot of these companies like Uber, or Twitter, or somebody like that-- once you've got the fixed costs in place, as the customer count goes up and the revenues go up, you're going to get a lot of pure profit dropping to the bottom line. But I think, as you and I talked about yesterday, predicting which ones can actually pull that off is a little tough. People have tried it in the past. And most of them that picked 10 or 15 companies that are similar to ones you describe-- it's going to be like venture capital. Two or three will be absolutely fantastic returns. Four or five will disappear. And then three or four will be OK. I'm sorry that's the way the statistics work. It frustrates people. They're saying, well, I think I can pick winners. I've got all this training. Or I know the internet business. But it's just very hard to consistently do it. AUDIENCE: I had a question. In today's low interest rates, Jeff, how do you think about what your discount rate should be and margin of safety should be in valuing equity? JEFFERY C. HOOKE: So a lot of predictions on the future cash flow then have to be brought back to the present if you're doing an analysis of the company. So here, we've had seven or eight years of very low interest rates by historical standards. 2% or 3% for government bond is very low compared to history. So what I do and what other some other more conservative investors do is say, well, now, we're in a period of unusually low rates. So if I'm projecting cash flow 15 years out or 10 years out, to use 2% or 3% as my base is just unrealistic. So I think a more rational approach is, what's a normal US Treasury Bond rate for the last 30 or 40 years? Probably around 5% or 6%. So I use that as the base rate for some kind of projection, and then I add the risk on top. So if you've got your base rate of 5, you add 6 or 7 for investing in the stock market as the equity risk that you're facing. And then you've got to add another one or two points, depending on what industry you're in or whatever unique attributes the company has. So for a garden variety equity investment I think someone has to use a discount rate of, say, 11% or 12% to be fair and objective. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] JEFFERY C. HOOKE: Thank you, [? Pernesh, ?] appreciate it. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
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Channel: Talks at Google
Views: 92,092
Rating: 4.8955874 out of 5
Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, The Myth of Private Equity, Jeffrey C Hooke, Security Analysis Business Valuation on Wall Street, private equity funds, impact of fees, private equity
Id: 0q2wFCmoP6o
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Length: 50min 56sec (3056 seconds)
Published: Tue Oct 23 2018
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