00:00 Speaker A
Scott, finally, I I want to um make a little bit of a turn to ask about the private equity business and a big trend that’s been going on, which is sort of opening it up more to retail investors, even if it’s through institutions. The news today, there was a report that Empower, which is a giant 401k company, is going to be partnering with some private equity institutions to offer that option to some of their clients. Um, what do you think of this opening up? What are the risks, rewards briefly, and are you guys in talks with any 401k providers?
01:41 Scott
So, um, private equity, I think as we’ve all seen the numbers and over almost any time period that uh that goes beyond the three-year period, and for most one-year periods, but certainly in 3, 5, 10, 20 years, private equity has been the most stable high return provider of all the asset classes. So there’s a natural inclination on the part of people to want to participate in in private equity. The nature of private equity is there will be some ups and downs, and you know, we as an industry interest uh have not had a five-year period of negative returns and we’re the only asset class that has not had that. So again, there’s more stability than it looks in aggregate, but there will be ups and downs. I think the issue for retail investors is just to recognize the the the long-term nature of this investment. It’s not something that you can trade or go in and out of um without some risk that you’re exiting at the exact wrong time and um you’ve missed some opportunities. It’s one that I think most institutional investors, who have been the bulk of the money that has flown that has come into private equity, fully understand. So, you know, they tend almost regardless of the economic environment, they tend to continue to invest at about the same uh the same levels, and those levels have been inching up and in fact, in some cases taking huge leaps forward. Um, I think for a retail investor, this is a really important opportunity to participate uh in an asset class with the kind of characteristics I just described. But again, there needs to be an understanding that, you know, this is not like uh being able to to trade or or look for uh the opportunity to get very fast liquidity.
