What Barbarians Like to Take Private (Ben Inker and John Pease)
gmo.com · 2026-05-21 · tier T1
Source: Letter · gmo.com dated 2026-05-21. Auto-generated factual summary. Not investment advice. Verify before acting.
GMO's analysis of 700 leveraged buyouts since 1981 reveals that private equity has shifted toward riskier targets: companies that are more leveraged and less profitable than public small-cap peers, with 40% of recent deals concentrated in software. The authors argue PE portfolios are not true diversifiers despite holding 85% smaller companies, as they share correlated exposures to business cycles, interest rates, and credit conditions. Additionally, performance persistence among PE managers has largely disappeared since 2000, meaning even well-resourced institutions struggle to consistently identify top-quartile funds. The letter recommends institutions either hedge PE's small-cap and low-quality bias through active strategies favoring high-quality stocks, or raise the bar substantially for new PE commitments rather than pursuing fixed allocation targets.
Citations · 6
“over the past 10 years, public-to-private LBOs have been heavily skewed toward software, which accounts for 40% of the recent deals closed”
p#23 · confidence 95%
“public-to-private LBOs rank a full quality decile below small caps, who in turn are almost four deciles junkier than the S&P 500”
p#20 · confidence 95%
“persistence of performance has fallen notably since 2000, and more so for private equity than venture capital. A particularly relevant finding is that the interim performance of funds that have not completed their life cycles is entirely unhelpful in predicting future fund returns”
p#47 · confidence 93%
“LBOs represent roughly 80% of the capital deployed by private equity funds”
p#11 · confidence 94%
“Low-quality stocks, on the other hand, have consistently underperformed both the broader market and high-quality stocks despite having a consistently high beta”
p#31 · confidence 92%
“This leaves the aggregate U.S. equity portfolio for our institution with a 57% weight in companies smaller than the S&P 500 and a 43% weight in S&P 500 constituents. "Indexing" the aggregate of public and private equity owned companies would assign an 82% weight to the S&P 500”
p#29 · confidence 94%
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Jeremy Grantham
GMO quarterly · market valuations and climate
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GMO warns that private equity portfolios face concentrated risks in low-quality, highly leveraged software companies with deteriorating manager performance persistence.
Original on gmo.com ↗2026-05-21
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Original on gmo.com ↗
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