Timothy Spangler's Blog

Money is a slippery concept at the best of times. How many Big Macs is equivalent to one Tesla? Is an hour of productive labor worth more or less than a copy of Bill O’Reilly’s latest biographical tome? If it can be difficult to comprehend in a single town [...]

Hand in hand with the question of how much a private equity should earn is how much tax they should pay on those earnings. This debate has increased significantly in recent years, as the high pay checks of more and more alternative fund managers have been reported in the [...]

The time value of money is central to all investing, but has a particular importance in the area of private equity. Interesting, the practice in the United Kingdom and Europe with regards to the payment of carried interest in private equity funds has differed historically from the practice in [...]

For Americans trying to come to grips with international soccer, the first hurdle to overcome is its sheer scale. For your average Englishman, Italian or Brazilian, the place of soccer in daily life is roughly equivalent to the media saturation in the United States of professional baseball, football and [...]

Critics of hedge funds who believed that the obituary had already been written for these controversial investment vehicles received some disappointing news this week. The San Francisco Public Employees Retirement System decided to allocate money to hedge funds for the first time, announcing that $1 billion would be invested [...]

Cue the famous theme tune from the much beloved television show “Law and Order.” This week, two equally sensational stories have captured the attention of the wider non-financial press, each involving those much maligned, but little-understood, investment professionals known colloquially of hedge fund managers. In Moscow, the founder of one [...]

Determining when, precisely, a private equity or hedge fund has delivered a true profit, rather than simply benefiting from a rising market, is not a straight-forward matter. When is an increase in the assets of a fund actually a profit worthy of granting the general partner payment of carried interest? [...]

Without a doubt, money is the primary driving factor in private equity and hedge funds. Lucrative fees are paid to talented fund managers by investors eager to earn high returns on their investments. Although much attention is paid to the 20% incentive allocation paid to successful managers, either [...]

If returns are meant to justify the fee levels being charged by private equity and hedge funds, then it is incumbent on all parties to clearly understand and report these returns accurately. To measure the performance of a fund, several important pieces of information are required. These include [...]

Investment inspiration can come from many highly unlikely sources. Wisdom is typically gained from an expensive education of real-world experience and painful losses. Occasionally, though, we can find important nuggets of wisdom tucked away in places where we would least expect it. For example, in films! “Withnail and I” is a [...]