When you think of investing, a few things usually come to mind: stocks, bonds and, at times, your mattress. But a wide universe of potential investments exists. Tons of ways to lose your money out there. The more unusual investment types are generally categorized as alternative assets.
Some of these fall into the general Wall Street sphere (the round kind), though they remain exotic for run-of-the-mill investors. Think: hedge funds, art work, rare coins, private equity, venture capital funds and/or just fancy bundles of derivatives. Other types of alternative assets might seem more like hobbies than investments. We're thinking of things like collecting rare wine or ancient Chinese erotic thimbles.
The issue with alternative assets is that they often require some specialized knowledge, a minimum amount of wealth and income, and a minimum standard of demonstrated financial expertise. They can be Century Investments (the kind that can go down 100% so the thought is that the less sophisticated investors who can't afford to lose everything should be made aware or protected from this peril.) Also, the markets tend to be far less liquid, meaning that it often takes a long time to get back your cash after you've bought all those sexy thimbles.
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Finance: What is private equity?4 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is private equity?
well there's public equity that's this stuff companies who IPO'd
they're listed on NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock [London stock exchange building appears]
Exchange and a bunch of others so if that's all the public equity you know
equities anyone can invest in... i.e open to the public see the catchy name there
then what's private equity hmm well it's private in part because not just anyone
can invest in it in most cases investors have to be "accredited" to
be able to invest in private equity and that just means that they've signed [Person signs document]
letters stating that they are big boys and girls and understand that there is a
whole lot of risk in what they are investing in and if you're out house
cleaner business dies well then they won't sue the managers for losing all [Man drops window cleaning product]
their money well structurally what makes a private
equity deal private instead of public well private companies are typically
much smaller than public ones their needs for capital are much lower so they
only need to tap a select group of usually wealthy investors rather than
massive pools of capital available in the public markets there are generally
two types of private equity in real life practice the first is what's called
growth equity which is really just late stage venture capital rounds put into [Growth equity explained on 100 dollar bill]
companies a relatively short time before an expected liquidity event ie an IPO in
a growth capital deal a high-growth tech company might be raising 50 million
dollars at a 250 million dollar pre-money valuation believing it can go
public for five hundred million dollars in two years later well this type of PE
deal is just a standard equity investment buying a good sized sliver of [Person places pie on floor]
ownership pie in you know outhouse cleansers dot-com...
well the other type of private
equity deal structure is one form or another of a leveraged buyout that is in
the second type of private equity deal the target for the buyout is usually a [Stock value rising on company stock value chart]
company who used to be good but then fell you know like that so a private
equity firm might buy old crappy purses.com for two billion dollars putting in
five hundred million of equity from their own coffers but then borrowing one
and a half billion bucks from kindly loving banks well the hope or belief
then is that the PE firm by leveraging geniuses they court to help them fix [Man holding bunch of flowers to woman]
broken companies like this one will be able to turn that purse frown upside
down add some cool tech to it like biometric purse opening and GPS tracking [People place biometric and GPS devices on a purse]
and how about heated handle things how about that that's tech
right and then three years after having taken the company private like it used
to be public they lever up, bought it took it private then they fixed it well
then the PE firm hopes to take it public again for four billion dollars turning
their 500 million equity stake into a value of some two and a half billion
dollars after paying back the one one and a half billion dollars in loans or
plus interest and all that that they took out to buy it in the first place
right to make five times your money in just a few years that's a really good
deal in reality it's financially a whole lot more complicated than this but well [Man with maths formulas floating in the background]
no more complicated than this purse has become.....
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