Thanks for your perspectives jace.h & lost
I started getting interested in alt managers about two years ago, and think I have drank the kool-aid about their growth prospects (which probably showed in the MFG post). I find some of the NA behemoths interesting, particularly Brookfield given its exposure to infra/renewables and Blackstone for being the overall gold standard. PX is a low-middle market alt managers that has used some debt to acquire managers, but is very FCF generative so that hasn't been a concern: it's also a very easy to understand business and has massive inside ownership which helps with the "sleep at night" factor. DBRG on the other hand is focused purely on digital infra (towers/cell/data centres etc.) so is a bit more "sexy" and is a much smaller position given it has undergone a multi-year transition from being a REIT and is still working on cleaning up the balance sheet. They have some digital infra assets on their balance sheet that will either be sold or moved into their funds, so it will end up being "asset light" like Blackstone etc.
This is clearly not an apples to apples comp, but PX MC is about 1.2b USD with about 20b USD fee-paying AUM. PAC clearly is a much lower MC and has several times more AUM (look-through/not look through, doesn't matter), but is probably a bit messier to analyse so the valuation reflects that.
Looking through PAC's affiliate list, they seem to have most sectors covered except for venture, so I'd be interested to see if they look to acquire in that area.
I am definitely going to go through their earnings/call transcripts to get a better sense if how they are thinking about deploying capital. Skimming through one presentation I noted that they referenced decreasing exposure to equity markets, so that got me interested. Purely my perspective, but I'd like them to acquire larger stakes in what they have than add 10-30% stakes in other managers: I think it just matches my want of keeping things simple. lost, clearly the managers you mentioned under point 3 are doing well so raising stakes in those business would be ideal hehe. Don't have to be a genius to figure out that the GQG stake has been a home run lol
Think it's time to do some more work on this one and come back when I something more valuable to contribute
(20min delay)