Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of September 24, 2019

Article Excerpt

Funds invested in venture capital in the U.S. amounted to $4 billion in 1994; the 2018 figure was a record $100 billion. Note that this is not the total value of U.S. venture capital holdings. These are the amounts of new investment in the field in these two years, respectively. Back when this burst of growth was just getting started, most venture-capital investment managers acknowledged that perhaps only one in 10 of the deals they financed wound up making any money for investors. However, that one success was often big enough to provide a payday for everybody involved: the insiders, the investment managers, and even the outside investors who put up the money. In good years, these returns were high enough to justify the drawbacks to venture-capital investing: high risk, weak investor communications, lack of liquidity, hidden conflicts of interest and so on. But high fees in venture capital eat up a lot of investor capital, in good years and bad. Since the…