The hottest Asset management Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Finance Topics

Can Your Pension or Retirement Money Get Lost in the Bermuda Triangle?

TK News by Matt Taibbi • 1620 implied HN points • 20 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. A lot of ordinary people’s pension and retirement money has been funneled into private credit funds and insurance vehicles, not just Wall Street elites.
  2. A sudden AI-driven selloff in software stocks — after new language models showed software engineering can be automated — slammed software valuations and spread stress through the private credit market.
  3. Because these funds are opaque and marketed as safe, everyday savers may not realize their long-term security is exposed to a hidden, potentially huge blowup.

Another Morning, Another Private Credit Fund Seizes Up

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 23 implied HN points • 24 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Large private credit funds are imposing withdrawal limits or capping redemptions, and multiple firms are now doing the same.
  2. Those limits make private credit less attractive to wealthy investors who value liquidity, so demand from that group may fall.
  3. Analysts expect these developments will slow fundraising across the private credit industry as investors become more cautious.

Carnage In Private Credit Just Got Worse

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 33 implied HN points • 23 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. When multiple large funds start limiting withdrawals at the same time, it’s a clear red flag that private credit is under serious stress.
  2. Credit markets just got worse very recently, indicating conditions are deteriorating quickly beneath the surface.
  3. Big headlines and feel-good market rallies can mask these problems, leaving investors distracted while credit strains build.

The Private Credit Crisis Is Spreading

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 26 implied HN points • 19 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. The private credit crisis is spreading into another corner of the market, showing that stress is moving beyond the usual hotspots.
  2. A fund has gated redemptions in a different sector, which signals rising liquidity strains and growing reluctance to meet investor withdrawals.
  3. Earlier warnings about risky pockets of the market now look prescient, so investors should be cautious about private credit and related exposures.

Why I Have Doubts About The “Next Global Financial Crisis”

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 26 implied HN points • 19 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. The private credit market is showing real strain—rising defaults and capped redemptions—but it’s much smaller than the old subprime market, so it probably won’t by itself spark a global financial crisis.
  2. Banks are still at risk because they lend to private credit funds and already carry big unrealized bond losses and weak commercial loans, so losses in private credit could still spill over and hurt the banking system.
  3. A straightforward defensive step is to keep cash in ultra-short Treasury bills via TreasuryDirect to avoid bank counterparty risk while maintaining liquidity.
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Private Credit Exec Admits "All" Marks Are "Wrong"

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 29 implied HN points • 16 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. A top private credit firm admitted that most valuation marks in the private markets are wrong.
  2. They estimated that loans to a typical leveraged mid-size software company might only recover about 20 to 40 cents on the dollar if things go south.
  3. That blunt warning suggests private market valuations are likely overstated and investors could face much bigger losses than current marks imply.

Private Credit Is Officially Fucked

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 42 implied HN points • 12 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Private credit funds are facing severe liquidity stress and are starting to restrict investor redemptions. That makes it hard for investors to get their money back.
  2. Major managers like BlackRock and Cliffwater, plus another big bank, have imposed withdrawal limits. That shows the problem is widespread across the industry.
  3. A run on private credit appears to be unfolding right now, which could accelerate the crisis and spread to other markets. Investors should expect more volatility and potential losses.

2025 Annual Letter: Technology is the Cake, Geopolitics is the Icing

Interconnected • 200 implied HN points • 09 Feb 26
💼 Business Asset management
  1. Put technology first, then assess geopolitical tailwinds or headwinds, then evaluate the company, and only finally consider price. Geopolitics is an unavoidable layer that can make or break a tech investment.
  2. Widespread adoption of AI agents will create strong demand for deterministic guardrails like observability, data governance, DevOps, and security because probabilistic models need rules and audit trails. Agent workloads are also more heterogeneous, which could shift infrastructure demand from GPUs toward CPUs.
  3. Human surveys will likely understate agent effectiveness as people protect jobs, creating a measurement problem for adoption, and political or local backlash against AI data centers can become a bipartisan constraint. Investors should expect regulatory and supply risks and consider modest hedging and risk management.

Bullish or Bearish? Market Update

DeFi Education • 939 implied HN points • 05 Jul 24
🔮 Crypto Asset management
  1. The current market has low liquidity, which makes it risky for traders with leveraged positions. This can lead to a lot of liquidations when prices change suddenly.
  2. Recently, there was a massive amount of crypto liquidations on July 4th, the largest since the FTX incident. This shows how volatile the market can be.
  3. The post offers a market update and a detailed overview of specific sectors for subscribers. It's designed to help them understand current trends and make informed decisions.

Another One Bites The Dust

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 44 implied HN points • 05 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Illiquid private loans can go from being valued at full price to worthless very quickly because they’re priced by internal models instead of daily market bids.
  2. A lot of pandemic-era, highly leveraged e-commerce rollups are failing as interest rates rise and demand softens, creating real borrower distress and loan defaults.
  3. Multiple sudden write-downs plus growing investor redemption requests could force a rapid, broader repricing of the large private credit market and stress funds built for slow-moving assets.

Top Links 966 Apollo going risk-off. What's up with Belgium. Southern geometries and François Ier's châteaux.

Chartbook • 400 implied HN points • 29 Dec 25
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Apollo Global, with roughly $908bn in assets, is moving to a risk-off stance by building liquidity at insurer Athene—buying tens of billions in U.S. Treasuries and trimming leveraged positions.
  2. Recent developments in Belgium are flagged as a noteworthy topic attracting attention.
  3. Cultural pieces highlight southern geometric art and the châteaux of François I, including imagery like Gunther Gerzso’s 'Southern Queen' (1963).

Two Tribes

Net Interest • 32 implied HN points • 27 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Bond and equity traders behave like two distinct tribes with different cultures and priorities; bond traders prize seriousness and protecting principal while equity traders chase upside, and their relative status has shifted over time.
  2. Banks act as transformation engines that turn debt into equity by holding portfolios of loans and bonds funded partly by shareholders, so you need to look at fixed income to understand banks.
  3. Analysts warn a rapid AI-driven shock could sharply raise defaults — UBS projects high yield 3–6%, leveraged loans 8–10% and private credit 14–15% — risking contagion into public credit markets. That outcome would strain capital adequacy at financial institutions, and private credit vehicles and BDCs are already showing early signs of stress.

The Private Credit Collapse Accelerates

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 35 implied HN points • 03 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Trouble in the private credit market is accelerating, with stress building across funds and loans.
  2. Blackstone’s private credit fund is facing record redemptions, signaling investors are pulling back and liquidity is under strain.
  3. The escalating conflict with Iran and other geopolitical noise are distracting markets and masking worsening fault lines in credit markets.

AI and I

Net Interest • 39 implied HN points • 20 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. AI coding assistants let non-technical people automate tasks such as indexing archives and getting daily idea suggestions by learning from their past content. They still can't fully surface private experiences or write in someone's exact voice.
  2. AI adoption in finance is still limited, with many analysts barely using generative tools, but early adopters report meaningful productivity gains—around 20% time saved—and are building AI-first cultures.
  3. AI is changing how market data is accessed and could weaken incumbents' competitive moats as firms and individuals build custom tools to replace traditional terminals. Data providers need to reposition themselves to stay relevant in an AI-first world.

The Ackman Complex

Net Interest • 27 implied HN points • 13 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Pershing Square is now a widely accessible, London-listed fund concentrated in a handful of large, liquid mega-cap stocks, and it buys into these names when short-term selling creates mispricing.
  2. High management and performance fees have materially reduced net returns for investors, so the firm has moved to create alternatives that can offer capital on cheaper terms.
  3. By acquiring an insurance company to generate investable float, Ackman is building a Buffett-style vehicle to scale capital without extra performance fees, but the strategy adds complexity and its success is not guaranteed.

Retail Investors: The New Smart Money

Spilled Coffee • 48 implied HN points • 04 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Retail investors are now a permanent market force, making up roughly 20–25% of trading volume and controlling a huge share of assets with over 100 million brokerage accounts.
  2. They’ve grown more sophisticated, increasingly using ETFs, options, and disciplined strategies like “buy the dip,” signaling more diversified portfolios and better risk management.
  3. Real-time data, social platforms, and crowd-sourced research have collapsed information gaps, letting retail coordinate and influence markets in ways institutions must track and respond to.

Secondaries Rising

Net Interest • 29 implied HN points • 30 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Private equity still ties up investor capital for many years, with holding periods and distributions lengthening and some funds dating back decades.
  2. A booming secondary market has emerged to unlock that illiquid capital, reaching a record $240 billion of trades in 2025 as big firms raise dedicated funds and buy specialist platforms.
  3. Allocators and managers are leaning heavily on secondaries to manage portfolios and liquidity, making it a top priority area for capital deployment going forward.

Private Credit Could Be On Thin Ice

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 32 implied HN points • 26 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Private credit is far more fragile than it’s marketed to be; many funds are highly leveraged and lightly regulated, so they can suffer big losses when conditions change.
  2. Some funds have already taken large markdowns because borrowers and business models that depended on cheap debt are now failing, which translates into real capital destruction for investors.
  3. The easy-money environment masked these weaknesses, and as borrowing costs rise more loans tied to fragile businesses will likely deteriorate, implying broader stress ahead for the private-credit market.

The Last Active Manager

Net Interest • 28 implied HN points • 23 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. A concentrated, long-term owner approach focused on companies with strong barriers to entry and often irreplaceable physical assets produced record returns. He also commits a lot of his own capital and works closely with management to realize value.
  2. Most active managers fail to beat indexes, and the growth of cheap passive investing is changing market structure in ways that make life harder for active funds.
  3. His model looks very different from typical hedge funds—small team, few shorts, and activism as a tool—and shows that selective, patient, high-conviction investing can still outperform.

Crops grow where cash flows

Topsoil • 471 implied HN points • 13 Mar 23
💼 Business Asset management
  1. Farms aim to be profitable by managing revenue and costs.
  2. Cash flow is crucial for farms due to seasonal and lumpy nature of income.
  3. Farmers have wealth tied in assets like land and equipment but may face cash flow challenges.

Nelnet Shows Some Skin

Mindset Value • 393 implied HN points • 09 Mar 23
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Nelnet's book value has grown consistently and it has never had a losing year, which is impressive.
  2. Nelnet is undervalued as its book value does not reflect the true value of its businesses and investments.
  3. Nelnet's investments in companies like ALLO, solar energy, and HUDL show potential for significant growth and increased value.

CROSSPOST: VIKTOR SHVETZ: Why Investors Shouldn’t Worry Too Much about the AI Bubble

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 161 implied HN points • 11 Jul 25
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Investors might overreact to the AI hype, but history shows that bubbles usually come with technological progress. It's important to invest wisely but not to fear investing in useful innovations.
  2. Every major technological revolution has been linked to speculative bubbles, leading to both chaos and creativity. After the chaos, societies often adjust and see growth and improvement.
  3. AI is set to change the job landscape significantly. While some jobs may disappear, others will emerge, and productivity is expected to increase, though not without initial challenges.

What is worth holding on to?

Fund Marketer • 3 implied HN points • 26 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Active asset managers are under heavy pressure from passive funds and ETFs, which is driving consolidation and buyouts. Cherry-picking a few old-economy winners doesn’t change the broader trend of active underperformance.
  2. Financial firms are repurposing legacy assets and structures—like art-backed lending and debt-for-nature swaps—to create new revenue streams and support future needs. These moves won’t solve big problems alone, but they are pragmatic ways to finance innovation and conservation.
  3. A long-running project about a Sputnik-era plan to teach advanced mathematics has been completed and will be released next summer. Finishing and sharing such work shows how historical ideas can be reexamined and made relevant today.

Living Legends: Finance & Investing

Olshansky's Newsletter • 22 implied HN points • 26 Dec 25
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. A small group of investors created the major investing styles we use today—value, macro, quantitative, activist, and systematic risk approaches.
  2. Each legend contributed a distinct mental model or tool that changed how markets are understood: durable-business investing and capital allocation, reflexivity and macro bets, math- and data-driven trading, activist pressure tactics, and formal frameworks for debt cycles and risk.
  3. Their books, letters, trades, and firms turned bold ideas into standard practice, providing the foundational zero-to-one lessons that modern finance now refines and builds upon.

The Distribution Layer

Lewis Enterprises • 235 implied HN points • 06 Jul 23
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. The future of alternative investments is undergoing significant changes in the market structure with emphasis on investment managers, allocators, and capital owners.
  2. Traditional asset managers are seeking growth by entering alternative investments but are facing challenges due to massive capital deployment impacting returns.
  3. There's a trend towards greater intermediation of capital allocation in the alternative investment landscape, leading to a more specialized distribution approach.

How Banks (Zeros) Make Money

DeFi Education • 899 implied HN points • 12 Apr 22
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Banks make money by accepting deposits and giving loans. They charge fees for services like managing assets and processing transactions.
  2. Decentralized finance (DeFi) is changing how finance works, allowing people to cut out banks and manage their money directly. This means banks might lose some of their income.
  3. Crypto and other digital methods are making it easier for people to manage their money and investments without needing traditional banks. This could change the banking industry a lot in the future.

[2025–2026] Week 8: Philip Fisher’s Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits

Behavioral Value Investor • 22 implied HN points • 21 Nov 25
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Graham's investment approach focuses on protecting against losses, studying past performance to make informed future decisions, and finding undervalued securities. He emphasizes a disciplined, quantitative analysis over qualitative factors.
  2. Fisher expands on qualitative analysis and values long-term company strength and stability. He suggests investors should consider both financial numbers and qualitative aspects like brand and competitive advantages when valuing companies.
  3. Modern investing requires a mix of Graham and Fisher's methods. Investors should incorporate risk awareness, long-term thinking, and adaptability to current market trends, especially regarding intangible assets and rapidly changing industries.

Stockpicker’s Paradise

Net Interest • 13 implied HN points • 12 Dec 25
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Dispersion within the financial sector has returned after years of muted differences, creating the widest gap between top and bottom performers since 2009.
  2. That renewed dispersion is a stockpicker’s paradise: specialist, long/short managers with deep financial knowledge are outperforming generalists and capturing big winners and losers.
  3. Structural shifts like higher rates and the end of the ‘free money’ era, plus divergent performance across banks, payments and asset managers, suggest active, specialized investors may keep finding opportunities into 2026.

Elevating Client Experience in the Commercial Real Estate Industry Requires More than Just Technology

PropTech Future • 137 implied HN points • 08 Mar 23
💼 Business Asset management
  1. Technology is important, but not the only solution to elevate client experience in commercial real estate.
  2. Real estate owners and managers need to focus on creating a compelling reason for employees to return to offices.
  3. Investing in human-oriented initiatives and hospitality training can set new industry standards for client experience.

What You Can Learn From The Investment Committee Process

DeFi Education • 679 implied HN points • 22 Mar 22
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Having a clear investment process is important. Documenting what you do helps you improve and grow over time.
  2. Teamwork can enhance your investment decisions. Consider gathering a small group to discuss and evaluate investment ideas together.
  3. Monitoring your investments is crucial. Don't just set it and forget it; keep an eye on your assets and know when to sell or change your strategy.

Does the rise of index funds make managers myopic?

Klement on Investing • 2 implied HN points • 10 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Managers facing frequent quarterly guidance often favor strategies that smooth short-term earnings, even when those choices reduce long-term value.
  2. High index fund ownership tends to increase short-term decision making, but mainly at firms that already give frequent earnings guidance, because managers then aim for predictable results.
  3. The key issue is fewer long-term shareholders and the incentive to stay in indexes, so it’s the combination of ownership composition and guidance habits — not index funds alone — that drives myopic behavior.

Alfa Leak: What is Alpha?

DeFi Education • 679 implied HN points • 27 Jan 22
🔮 Crypto Asset management
  1. Alpha is about making more money than a standard benchmark like the S&P 500. If you earn more than this benchmark, you have positive alpha.
  2. Beta measures how much an investment's price changes compared to a benchmark. A beta of 1 means it moves the same way as the benchmark, while higher or lower numbers show more volatility.
  3. In the crypto world, it's important to compare your gains against Bitcoin and understand how cryptocurrencies are becoming more similar to stocks over time. This can affect how much risk you take.

Depreciation explained

Concepts of Finance 🧠 • 219 implied HN points • 30 Mar 23
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Depreciation is when things lose their value over time, like cars and electronics. This impacts how much you could sell them for later.
  2. For businesses, depreciation helps account for the decrease in value of their assets, matching costs with how much money those assets help make over time.
  3. Knowing how quickly something depreciates can guide your buying decisions. Some items, like luxury goods, hold their value better than others.

Top Questions ahead of Eagle Alpha’s Next Level Alternative Data Conference

The Data Score • 39 implied HN points • 16 Jan 24
💼 Business Asset management
  1. The future of the alternative data industry and how smart asset managers are preparing for it is a key theme in the upcoming conference.
  2. The use of generative AI in financial markets, its applications, constraints, and implications are important topics to be explored.
  3. Corporate data strategy including use cases, monetization challenges, and blockers will be a focal point of discussion at the conference.

Asset management is not a meritocracy

Klement on Investing • 3 implied HN points • 05 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Asset management is not a meritocracy: even when fund performance and asset gathering are easy to measure, pay and promotions often don’t follow actual results.
  2. Female and minority fund managers deliver similar performance and flows as their peers but earn far less — roughly 27% less for women, 20% less for minorities, and about 44% less for minority women — and their wage growth over time is weaker.
  3. Women and minority managers are more likely to be laid off and less likely to be promoted (for example, women ~1.7% and Asian managers ~2.4% less likely to be promoted), showing persistent unconscious bias and a need for stronger DEI action.

What happens if we apply KCOR to financial markets?

Steve Kirsch's newsletter • 2 implied HN points • 11 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. A fully algorithmic, long-only U.S. large-cap equity strategy was derived from the KCOR framework and designed for low turnover, no leverage, and tax efficiency with only two tunable parameters.
  2. A 2000–2025 hypothetical backtest shows very large compounded returns and final equity growth, but it also involved extreme volatility, deep drawdowns, and the results are unaudited and not guaranteed.
  3. Live trading began with preliminary gains but the track record is short, the strategy remains high-risk and may underperform, and any investment interest is being directed to accredited or qualified investors only.

Get Woke, Go Broke: Vanguard Ditches ESG Investing

Anxiety Addiction & Ascension • 39 implied HN points • 06 Mar 23
💰 Finance Asset management
  1. Vanguard, the world's second-largest asset management firm, with $8 trillion AUM, has withdrawn from ESG, which is a significant move.
  2. There are signs of people waking up and pushing back against social engineering, like the ESG framework, showing a recalibration in public perception.
  3. Major financial institutions, like Vanguard and JPMorgan Chase, distancing themselves from ESG indicates cracks in the system and growing public awareness, potentially due to popular sentiment.