Forewarning: This post is the anti-Montauk blog post. Brace yourselves for extreme bias. I'm Texan and not from a Montauk-ian institution.
There's this sense that those in VC and PE and Hedge Funds are foundational bootstrapping swashbuckling industrialists.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In the words of my lacrosse coach, a bit of a drunkard who definitely seemed to partake in cannabis....... "y'all a bunch of bitch-ass punks, get off your high horse."
In a tone of endearment, I regularly ask these people to "get me that white-boy montauk ivy league asian trustwad pension money, so I can wrangle viable returns."
I went to a state school and studied engineering, not the pixel-shaking database cell wrangling type.
Keep in mind, if you had bought ISPs with IPV4 allocations, you'd have wiped the floor with everyone and the investment would have vibed with the "internet is eating the world thesis" in a $400B+ market. Who knows the returns on leased IPV4 addresses.....
I know a guy who has 500k IPV4 addresses. His ISP paid him dividends above bond rates virtually risk free for over a decade.
Most pension money has been alocated for investment to allocators who are white, white passing, or Asian and went to an ivy league program. Whites from fly over schools can get the PE money, but rarely the sweetest nectar of pension money. If you're black, hispanic, or a woman....you usually have to piss those dreams goodbye unless you come from money or institutional flagging.
Pension Money = DEI for Montauk Stanford Trustwads
Performance doesn't really matter. It's the epitome of good ole boys network. A racket unto its own.
This cohort of folks flipped political viewpoints recently and is now "based" and believes in DOGE and celebrates Elon, but many would never survive an inquisition into the performance and books of their portfolios, salaries issued, management fees, carry, and especially so when benchmarked against reasonable corollary assets.
(For example, if you invested in a private electric battery company - your public market corollary might have been $POWL....etc.)
Every American should read Pension Warriors.
These people would have their burn notice handed to them if DOGE ever had to go after Pension allocations.
The Montauk Trustwad crew wouldnt' survive a viable DOPE analysis of pension allocations. Read here.
95% of people in these professions and many downstream of these funds are compensated above market management, performance, and employment fees for below public market performance. Most of the companies invested in have negative energy return on investment.
Remember, most of these people who claim to be the most sophisticated investors on the planet missed out on fracking and farm land buying that minted a significant % of multibillionaires in the USA.
The PE funds use cheap gov't capital to roll up assets and raise price. Stealth nationalization of labor and licensure and it leads to a negative quality of life.
The performance of these 3 asset classes is largely opaque. Uncle Sam has been endlessly funding this cohort.
Even a cohort of the "independent thinker" angel investors are largely just chasing pension funds painting the tape.
Once you understand this view on the racket, you can never look back at these asset classes and the people who work in them the same way.
To give you an idea of how big the rackets are in this space, none of the companies like Allvue Systems or any of its competitors has a standardized formula for showing performance of funds, because it's all "bespoke."
