This week's interesting finds

This week in charts

2025’s top keyword searches by month

Median age a U.S. company goes public by year

S&P 500 Index valuation metrics – today vs. history

% of constituents outperforming the S&P 500 Index

A.I. vs oil companies – 5-year return above cost of capital vs. capital expenditure as % of cash flow

Pension allocations - public (active) vs. public (passive) vs. private equity

2025 performance by sector

2025 performance by sector and region

Data sources – 2024 vs. 2025

Uses for machine learning/A.I. – 2024 vs. 2025

Uses for generative A.I. – 2024 vs. 2025

Private equity firms sell assets to themselves at a record rate

Private equity firms sold companies to themselves at a record rate this year, making use of a controversial tactic to hold on to assets as managers struggled to find buyers or list their investments. 

Roughly a fifth of all PE sales this year involved groups raising money from new investors to acquire businesses from their older funds, up from 12-13 per cent the previous year, said Sunaina Sinha Haldea, global head of private capital advisory at Raymond James. Such transactions sell assets already owned by a PE group to so-called continuation vehicles — newer funds also managed by the firm. The tactic enables PE firms to return cash to investors in older funds, but has prompted concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

“This year is set to break all records,” added Sinha Haldea, predicting that the final figures for 2025 would show $107bn in such sales, up from $70bn last year. Skip Fahrholz, who oversees such transactions in Europe at investment bank Jefferies, concurred that the global total for the year for sales involving continuation vehicles would be close to $100bn.

The use of the structure has boomed in recent years as buyout firms have struggled to secure the valuations they want from external buyers or public markets, choosing instead to hold on to investments in hope of fetching more in the future.

In a deal valuing the company at €15bn, European private equity house PAI Partners sold part of its stake in Froneri, an ice cream group that includes brands such as Häagen-Dazs in the US, to a continuation vehicle for the second time.

Vista Equity Partners, New Mountain Capital and Inflexion also used multibillion-dollar continuation funds to sell down some of their largest investments.

Sinha Haldea said such transactions had become “a popular and effective win-win-win liquidity solution in a stressed exit environment, where exit values are still recovering from 2024 lows”. The structure is attractive to buyout firms because such deals generate extra management fees and potentially lucrative future performance fees from companies in ageing funds.

This week’s fun find

Why We’ve Been Chasing 10,000 Steps for Decades—and What Japanese Walking Gets Right Instead

I used to think of walking as a consolation prize—the thing you did when you couldn’t run. I couldn’t imagine going from an 8:10 pace to genuinely enjoying what felt like a 24-minute mile—the kind of slow movement where my Apple Watch buzzes to ask me if I’ve stopped moving.

Fast forward to May of this year, and a new walking trend has captured our attention: Japanese walking. In a viral video, fitness coach Eugene Teo explains this method of interval-style walking, which involves alternating between walking fast for three minutes and walking slow for three minutes, for five sets in half an hour. The goal? Metabolic efficiency.

Before I ever mapped out my walking loop, I thought 10,000 steps was a rule. Not a suggestion. It lived everywhere: embedded in my fitness tracker, baked into my phone’s health app, echoed in friends’ attempts to “close their rings.” It felt like the adult version of eating your vegetables. You just did it.

But here’s what no one tells you. Ten thousand steps didn’t come from science. It came from a pedometer ad.

In mid-1960s Japan, amid a national fitness push ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, exercise physiologist Yoshiro Hatano estimated that doubling the average person’s daily steps—from about 4,000 to 10,000—“would result in an increased energy expenditure of about 300 kcal/day.” There were no clinical trials. No test subjects. Just back-of-the-envelope energy math.

In the 2015 book Health Trackers: How Technology Is Helping Us Monitor and Improve Our Health, technology journalist Richard MacManus describes how Japanese companies, such as Coca-Cola Japan and the green tea brand Ito En, distributed pedometers as part of large-scale marketing campaigns. These giveaways weren’t just promotions; they reinforced 10,000 steps per day as a public health guideline, embedding it into daily routines and branding it as common sense. What began as a marketing device was quietly becoming a cultural standard.

That foundation set the stage for one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic inventions—the FitBit. When Fitbit launched in 2009, it put 10,000 steps as the default daily goal—not because medical science required it, but because decades of repetition had already made it feel official. Fitbit’s own Help Center confirms: “The default daily step goal is 10,000 steps.”

The Benefits of Japanese Walking, According to Science

In 2007, exercise physiologist Dr. Hiroshi Nose and his team at Shinshu University in Japan developed Interval Walking Training (IWT), a deceptively simple yet highly effective protocol specifically designed for aging populations. Walk fast, then slow, three minutes each, five times per walking session, at least four days each week. No wearables. No tracking apps required.

In a five-month randomized controlled trial involving 246 older adults, IWT outperformed moderate-intensity continuous walking and sedentary control groups. Participants in the IWT group experienced a ten percent increase in peak aerobic capacity (VO₂ max), as well as a 13- and 17-percent increase in quadriceps and hamstring strength, respectively. A reduction in systolic blood pressure was another benefit.

Broader reviews associate IWT with significant gains in fitness, muscle strength, and glycemic stability in individuals with type 2 diabetes.

Of course, IWT isn’t a magic bullet. The Shinshu University training method focused on a fairly specific group—healthy, older Japanese adults—which makes it harder to say how the protocol translates across more diverse populations.

But here’s the encouraging part, per the Shinsu study: even when participants didn’t hit every target, they still saw meaningful gains in blood pressure, aerobic capacity, and strength. In other words, you don’t have to be perfect for IWT to work—you just have to show up often enough.

In a culture that equates health with hustle, that quiet efficiency is the most radical act of all.

This week's interesting finds

This week in charts

Online shopping

10-year government bond yields by country

U.S. median single-family house size

U.S. electric vehicle sales

E.U. electric vehicle sales

U.S. obesity & diabetes rates

U.S. weight-loss injectables

Technology weight – U.S. equity indexes

Current vs. historical P/E valuations – U.S. equity indexes

U.S. manufacturing jobs

Household wealth by source

When Your Private Fund Turns $1 into 60 Cents

For all fund investors, NAV is supposed to stand for “net asset value.” For some, however, it’s turning out to mean “not actual value.”

That’s the hard lesson of recent weeks when some funds that invest in private assets have sought to go public. Prices that investors expected to be stable have collapsed as soon as the funds were exposed to public markets.

These transitions from private to public cast doubt on Wall Street’s narrative that investors can have their cake and eat it, too. You can have the mild price fluctuations of nontraded assets, or you can have access to your money whenever you want—but it’s turning out that you can’t have both.

And this situation bolsters arguments that asset values in private-markets funds don’t always reflect reality.

On Dec. 16, what used to be a nontraded portfolio called Bluerock Total Income+ Real Estate Fund began trading on the New York Stock Exchange as the Bluerock Private Real Estate Fund. With a stated net asset value of $24.36 a share, the fund closed at a market price of $14.70—a 39.7% discount from NAV. For every dollar the fund manager said your shares were worth at 9:30 a.m., the stock market was willing to pay you only 60 cents by 4 p.m.

On Nov. 13, another nontraded investment, FS Specialty Lending Fund, went public at a net asset value of $18.67—and closed the day at $14, a 25% discount from NAV.

Meanwhile, other private portfolios seeking to go public have gotten stymied by their investors.

On Dec. 16, shareholders at Priority Income Fund’s annual meeting rejected a proposal for the fund to offer stock to the public next year with a 270-day period in which existing investors wouldn’t be able to sell all their shares.

In November, Blue Owl Capital aborted a plan to merge one of its private funds into an NYSE-listed vehicle that trades at about a 20% discount to NAV.

You don’t need a class in economics to know the most fundamental fact about prices: Any asset is only worth what you can get someone else to pay you for it.

This week’s fun find

The Most Magical, Moving Four Minutes in Music

There are four minutes of Ravel that I hope I never get over.

“Le Jardin Féerique,” usually translated as the enchanted or fairy garden, barely breathes into life as the apotheosis of the childhood stories that Ravel gathered under the title “Ma Mère l’Oye,” or “Mother Goose.” Ravel wrote nothing more magical, and perhaps nothing so moving.

It begins in a hushed, hesitant atmosphere, an ineffably fragile melody sighing to a gentle, poetic accompaniment. Soon, that gives way to a tender duet for solo violin and viola, a halo of woodwinds around them, the strum of a harp and the chime of a celesta behind. Slowly the music drifts upward, melting back into the initial melody as it gathers itself to end in incandescent, irresistible C major, percussion sparkling through the string canopy of your dreams.

“I so enjoy looking at the faces of the musicians when they’re producing all that sound,” the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen said in an interview. “It is just a deep, deep, deep, spiritual, sensual, tactile pleasure. I think every composer, deep down, would like to be able to do something like that.”

Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the Berlin Philharmonic in “Ma Mère l’Oye,” recorded for the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall.

For many listeners, “Le Jardin Féerique” casts an unusual spell. Why?

Often said to be a childlike man himself, Ravel wrote the first of the “Ma Mère” pieces, “Pavane de la Belle au Bois Dormant,” in 1908, as a piano duet about Sleeping Beauty for two young children to whom he told fairy tales. In 1910, he added four more miniatures to make the children a suite, basing three of them on old stories that he quoted in the score, and ending with “Le Jardin Féerique,” which had no such story attached. By 1911, Ravel had orchestrated the suite, and the next year he elaborated it into a ballet as well, his musical garden blooming into a glade for Sleeping Beauty, who awakens at dawn, with Prince Charming close at hand.

This week's interesting finds

This week in charts

Cash levels at record lows

U.S. effective corporate tax rate declines

Estimated data center electrical consumption by U.S. state

Capex of major infrastructure projects – % of U.S. GDP

Reading for leisure in the U.S. declines

U.S. mortgage interest rates

Drug approval and research & development spend

Consumption expectations – 2023 vs. 2050

Historical price-to-earnings multiples by region

Value outperforming in Europe; Growth outperforming in the U.S.

Market performance

Cyclicals vs. defensives, by region

50 years of historical weights – Technology and U.S.

Investors seek protection from risk of AI debt bust

Trading in products that pay out when companies default is soaring as investors hunt for ways to protect their portfolios against the risk that the artificial intelligence boom turns into a bust.

Volumes in so-called credit default swaps tied to a handful of US tech groups have climbed 90 per cent since early September, according to data from clearinghouse DTCC.

The expanding use of these strategies underscores how some investors are growing uneasy about a rush of bond deals by tech companies to finance AI infrastructure, which could take years to generate returns. 

The rush to hedge against potential defaults comes as Wall Street’s tech sell-off was reignited last week by earnings from software group Oracle and chipmaker Broadcom that had fallen short of investors’ lofty expectations.

The debt and equity of companies linked to the tech boom have whipsawed in recent months as traders scrutinised earnings reports and debated how competing AI products from companies such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic would affect demand for chips and data centres.

The uptick in CDS trading has been particularly pronounced for Oracle and cloud computing company CoreWeave, both of which are raising billions of dollars in debt to secure data centre capacity.

A new market for Meta CDS sprang up after the company sold $30bn of bonds to finance AI projects in October.

CDS are used for default protection but also to hedge against or bet on swings in bond prices.

Appetite for CDS for highly rated US companies was thin to non-existent at the start of the year, when tech groups were primarily funding their AI spending through their hefty cash piles and strong earnings. 

The market warmed up once those companies began to tap debt markets to cover their mounting costs. Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Oracle raised a combined $88bn this autumn to fund AI projects, with JPMorgan predicting that investment-grade companies are on track to raise $1.5tn by 2030.

For Oracle, which has a lower credit rating than some of its investment-grade peers, CDS weekly trading volumes have more than tripled this year. The cost of buying the derivatives has risen to its highest level since 2009.

Oracle’s shares and bonds suffered a deep sell-off this week after it missed analysts’ estimates for revenue in the third quarter. They fell further on Friday after it delayed construction of at least one data centre.

This week’s fun find

Why singing is surprisingly good for your health

It's that time of year when the air starts to tinkle with angelic voices – or ring with the occasional lusty hymn – as carol singers spread their own indomitable brand of festive joy. All that harking and heralding. It's joyful and triumphant.

But these bands of tinsel-draped singers may be on to something. Whether they realise it or not as they fill shopping centres, train stations, nursing homes and the street outside your front door with jubilant song, they are also giving their own health a boost.

From the brain to the heart, singing has been found to bring a wide range of benefits to those who do it, particularly if they do it in groups. It can draw people closer together, prime our bodies to fight off disease and even suppress pain. So might it be worth raising your own voice in good cheer?

This week's interesting finds

Deck the halls with pleasing long-term returns

As the holidays approach, we’re embracing the spirit of the season while staying focused on what matters most: helping grow your family’s hard-earned wealth.

This week in charts

Forward P/E ratios, by theme

S&P 500 Index returns and intra-year declines

S&P 500 Index bear market recoveries

Beauty expenditure, by geography

U.S. bank regulation changes 

CCC/B loan spread ratio at highest level in over 15 years

Loan default rates remain elevated 

Correlation between E&P stocks and WTI has gone negative

U.S. and Worldwide google search terms for Canadian Oil & Gas and Energy

% of passive AUM of Total AUM, by country

Oil barrels per oz of silver

U.S. megacap vs. microcap ETFs, Tech fund flows

Asset class performance, by year

Beware rushing into private credit deals, warns Canadian pension giant

Private credit “is a buyer beware” market, the head of Canada’s largest pension fund said, warning institutional investors against rushing into deals.

John Graham, chief executive of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, told the Financial Times that the C$778bn ($561bn) fund mainly invested directly in private credit rather than funds.

He said to non-investment-grade private credit investors: “It’s a ‘buyer beware’ market. You should be sophisticated and you should know what you’re buying.”

While Graham thought private credit served a useful role in the system, distributing risk broadly, he had concerns over the “speed at which deals are getting done”. 

“We have to make sure that we aren’t compromising on due diligence,” he said, adding that he sometimes had to remind his teams that “it’s OK to miss something”.

Private debt funds raised $154bn in the first nine months of this year, according to PitchBook. That puts managers on track to raise less than the $230bn for 2024, but annual fundraising is still far above levels seen a decade ago.

Individual investors have also been buying more. Consultancy Oliver Wyman said private credit holdings by the wealthy had grown 2.5-fold in the past three years — four times faster than the traditional institutional business.

However, the sector has faced a series of setbacks this year. Blackstone president Jon Gray said in October that the era of excess returns had ended as central banks had cut interest rates, with mid-teens returns in private lending giving way to more muted results.

The implosions of auto parts maker First Brands and subprime auto lender Tricolor, which had both amassed debt from non-bank lenders, also reverberated across credit markets and prompted further warnings on wider risks from private credit blow-ups.

CPPIB has a large allocation to private markets compared with some other large pension funds globally, with 11 per cent in public and private credit and 29 per cent invested in private equity. 

Graham said despite low distributions from private equity funds back to investors in recent years, CPPIB had been investing in the asset class for 20 years. “We continue to be believers in the governance model around private equity and private ownership,” he added.

Graham also said the partnership between institutional investors such as CPPIB and private equity funds, known as general partners, had been “a very profitable model for everybody”.

If the rush of retail funds into private equity changed norms, such as buyout fund managers offering their large fund backers the chance to invest directly into companies to lower their fees, he said it would “impact, undoubtedly, our appetite for the asset class”. 

Last month, the Institutional Limited Partners Association trade group warned that the number of deals needed to deploy wealthy individuals’ cash could pull managers’ attention away from investing the capital of pension plans and endowments.

This week’s fun finds

Meet the Hive Architect, the Carpenter Independently Installing Homes for Honeybees

“Wherever I go, bees come,” says Matt Somerville. A carpenter by trade, Somerville is also a committed conservationist, having spent the last 14 years building and installing approximately 800 homes for the dwindling insect populations around the English countryside.

“The Hive Architect,” a film directed by Max Weston and released by the outdoor clothing brand Fera, follows the scrappy, pipe-smoking woodworker as he carves out a log, builds a conical roof, and finally ventures out into a meadow to erect his construction. “There is a widely held theory that our British honey bee couldn’t exist without being domesticated by beekeepers,” says Fera. “However, for bee conservationists like Matt Somerville, this theory is ludicrous.”