Private credit is in an ordinary cycle that ends in consolidation. Managers with diversified funding will take share from those who cannot raise it. David Golub, Co-CEO at Golub Capital, argues this in a podcast interview on Alt Goes Mainstream. Four years of falling base rates, tighter spreads, and a normal credit cycle have cut returns and widened dispersion. Firms that lose access to capital will shrink, and the survivors get better spreads and terms. Allocators should und

What's New Middle market direct lending moves with private equity, which makes it a weak defensive counterweight in an equity-heavy portfolio. James Li, President and Partner at Davidson Kempner, argues this in a podcast interview on Alt Goes Mainstream. Direct lenders finance the same companies the sponsors own, one level up the capital structure. Distressed and opportunistic credit run the other way, buying when sponsors and lenders are forced to move assets. Allocators sho

Companies stay private for over a decade while venture still sells a 10-year fund. Powerlaw's Ben Black argues a publicly traded 1940 Act closed-end fund is the wrapper that fixes the duration mismatch, and a better business than the product it replaces.

Every venture task with a benchmark will be automated. Standard Metrics CEO John Melas-Kyriazi argues the human edge migrates to unscorable decisions: founder judgment, portfolio support, and the 30 to 50% of a fund held in reserves.

Credit runs on systems, velocity, and balance sheet access, so it will consolidate harder than private equity. Ares' Joel Holsinger on why four or five platforms get the first call, why all capital lives in a box, and why data centers are net-lease credit.

Defense venture alpha comes from navigating a broken procurement customer, and every reform shrinks it. Marque's Jake Chapman on classified requirements, the small-drone glut, and why $100 billion a year of capital now chases a $2 trillion market.

A track record is an artifact of a team, a market, and a moment. Former Berkeley endowment CIO John-Austin Saviano argues that a first-time fund, where the founder shares everything, can be a lower-risk commitment than a multi-billion Fund XIV.

Fund size, not strategy, is what kills investment firms. Notre Dame's former CIO Scott Malpass explains why he paid premium carry, negotiated capacity rights instead of fee cuts, and why allocators chasing fee breaks from scaling managers are buying the wrong thing.

Footwork's five-person team no longer looks at its CRM; agents populate it. Nikhil Basu Trivedi argues a firm whose decisions are legible to a model turns judgment into a compounding asset, and that the entry-level analyst role is the first casualty.

Vendor data is commoditized. Earlybird's Andre Retterath argues venture alpha now lives in a firm's own decision record: 200-plus IC votes, 1,000 memos, and a model that says no as well as the best human investor, so partners spend time only on the 10 to 12 deals that matter.

In a power-law asset class, the sell decision is as consequential as the buy. HarbourVest's Scott Voss on the 15,000-company dataset where 10% of names return 90% of value, the Klarna lesson, and why the 10-year fund forces the wrong exit.

Only about 20 of 3,000 US venture firms have consistently returned 3x net since 2005. Accolade's Aram Verdiyan explains why survivors sit at two extremes, brand platforms and size-disciplined seed specialists, and why the messy middle is where firms go to die.

AI removed the barriers to starting a company and broke revenue as a signal. Marathon's Michael Gilroy argues seed investors must underwrite gross profit and earnings power the way growth investors do, and replace transcripts with 15-plus back-channel customer calls.

A fixed ownership target destroys the deal flow that makes seed investing work. Scribble's Elizabeth Weil on why fund size is the strategy, why a $1 million collaborative check beats a 15% demand, and how fund one returned 75% DPI with no ownership rule.

As LPs consolidate into ten mega-platforms, OpenGate's Josh Adams argues the remaining alpha sits in complex European corporate carve-outs won on speed and certainty, and warns that capital flowing downstream from the largest firms will test that edge.

Private equity sponsors known for aggressive treatment of lenders see their portfolio companies charged materially more for loan capital. Vincent Buccola of the University of Chicago and Greg Nini of Drexel report the finding in a September 2026 study of 1,889 first-lien term loans issued between 2016 and 2025. Adding sponsor identity to a model that already controls for rating, industry, quarter, and market spreads lifts explanatory power from 0.79 to 0.84.

Private credit fundraising outside the 5 largest managers nearly halved in a year. Squire Patton Boggs assembles the data in a recent client alert testing the headlines against reported figures. That cohort raised US$32.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026, down from US$64.3 billion a year earlier. Managers raising between US$500 million and US$5 billion took the sharpest hit, at roughly 60% less capital. Average fund size in the cohort slipped from US$1.1 billion to US$0.9

Distributing private markets products to the wealth channel demands a firmwide operational and cultural commitment that most asset managers underestimate, and firms without top-down support should stay out. Ava Mallin, Managing Director of US Private Wealth Solutions at Ardian, argues this in a conversation recorded live at iCapital Connect on Alt Goes Mainstream. Private wealth is complex and expensive, she says, requiring operational overhauls and increased distribution spe

The Financial Stability Board's report on vulnerabilities in private credit, unpacked in EY's latest analysis, marks a shift from watching the market to testing it. Regulators have stopped asking whether private credit should keep growing. They are now asking whether firms can prove how it is valued, funded, and sold. The growth figures are the easy part of the story. The harder part is that a $2.3 trillion asset class has never run through a full credit cycle, and the data n

PitchBook's Q2 2026 Global Private Market Fundraising Report shows global private capital fundraising heading for a fifth straight annual decline. Managers raised $658.1 billion across 1,499 funds in the first half, and trailing 12 month capital is down 12.7% while fund count is down 37%. The gap between those two figures is the real story. Capital is not leaving the asset class so much as consolidating into fewer, larger vehicles run by established managers. Private debt is