Published in Private Wealth Magazine, December 2020
Secondary Private Equity. Many large investors are so successful because they hold a high proportion of private equity in their portfolios over the long term. “Even for wealthy private investors and smaller family offices, however, this is not so easy to implement,” explains Florian Dillinger, Matador Partners Group AG. “We founded Matador to give them easy access to this asset class.”
When David Swensen took over responsibility for the Yale Foundation’s investments in 1985, the elite university’s fund was just one of many small institutional investors in the USA. Today – after 35 years of exceptional performance – the Yale Foundation is playing in the Champions League with around 30 billion US dollars in assets. And Swensen is regarded as the prototype of the successful long-term investor. “I asked myself at the beginning of my career how he does it,” says Florian Dillinger, Matador Partners Group, “and the answer was very simple: the key to his success was that Yale always invested around a third of his assets in unlisted companies – private equity, venture capital. The stock market only reflects a very small part of the economy. The more exciting things are often found outside the capital market.”
