Gluten-free food has been a significant trend for the past decade, especially the last few years. Consequently, select private equity firms have made investments in companies that offer an assortment of gluten-free food.

Our research database shows 52 investments in gluten-free brands (collectively held by 42 unique private equity firms). Of these, 36 are current holdings, 16 prior investments. 2017 had the most investments of any year thus far with 9 gluten-free portfolio investments. By comparison, there were 6 in 2018 and 3 in 2019.

Headlines about private equity investments tend to focus more on the glamorous deals and faster-paced industries, particularly technology. Because of this, one might erroneously conclude private equity has curtailed investments in manufacturing companies. While it is true that manufacturing now represents a lower percentage of all private equity acquisitions compared to historical standards, PE firms still actively invest in the manufacturing sector.

In the last 60 days, our M&A Research Database has recorded 52 new private equity platform investments in manufacturing companies (there are even more add-on acquisitions in this space), of which pharmaceutical manufacturing was the most represented manufacturing category:

• Pharmaceutical manufacturing (5 investments)
• Automotive-related manufacturing (4 investments)
• Contract manufacturers (4 investments)
• Aerospace manufacturing (2 investments)
• Lighting manufacturers (2 investments)

Charles Schwab recently announced plans to acquire Ameritrade for $26 billion. The combined entity will have 24 million customer accounts holding ~$5 trillion assets.

While most people are familiar with Charles Schwab and Ameritrade for their enormous retail brokerage businesses, most do not know these firms also offer prime brokerage and custodial services to institutional investment funds.

Our research database tracks 53,711 institutional investment funds (hedge funds, private equity funds, venture capital funds, real estate funds, etc.). These funds often use third-party providers as prime brokers and custodians.

This data study reports on the prime brokerage and custodial services offered by Schwab and Ameritrade.

The top 25 private equity firms collectively hold $1.8 trillion in assets under management (AuM). The table below show the firms, ranked by AuM.

As a generational segment, Baby Boomers (now 55 – 75 years old), have a significant impact on the demographics of the U.S. population and on the markets that serve them.

As this population segment ages, there is an expected increased demand for elderly care and related services. According to Morningstar, the average age of admittance into a nursing home is 79. With the oldest baby boomers currently at 75 years, coupled with a ~5-year median holding period for private equity portfolio companies, I thought we should see an increased investment appetite for elderly care operators and related service providers from private equity firms. As it turns out, we do.

In advance of the Energy Game Change Conference, which includes a Women in Alternatives networking event, we reviewed all senior-level deal team members employed by U.S.-based private equity firms to understand female leadership representation across all the firms compared to those that specifically invest in energy-related companies.

In advance of the Rice Energy Finance Summit, I explored private equity investment trends in the energy sector using data from our M&A research database. The chart below compares PE investments in oil & gas versus renewable energy, as a percentage of total PE platform investments (add-on investments excluded).

I periodically update the private equity portfolio company holding periods data study to track this trend over time.

The longest median holding period for private equity owned portfolio companies was 5.6 years, back in 2014. This is intuitive because 5 or 6 years prior to 2014 represented those portfolio companies acquired at the peak of the market, just before the last recession. Consequently, the holding periods were extended, allowing more time to recoup from ill-timed acquisitions.

Since 2014, there has been a slight-but-steady downward trend in portfolio company holding durations – until now. The last data point on the right (2019 YTD, through August), represents the first trend reversal for this metric since 2014. Based on the last 5 years, I was expecting to report a median holding period of 4.6 years, but instead, the data shows:

2019 YTD Median Holding Period = 4.8 years

Following our interview with Emmersion, we reviewed our database of private equity platform investments in Latin America over the past five years. The following sectors were the most prominent private equity investment sectors in Latin America:

The cloud infrastructure is having a profound effect on technology, from storage to bandwidth to scale to price.

In recent years, massive technological platforms (servers) have been made available to large and small customers alike. It is, in fact, one of the most impactful advancements in technology in recent years. Due to the massive scale of these cloud computing platforms offered by Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure) and others, near infinite computational power is offered at a fraction of the price compared to just a decade earlier. Consequently, many applications that could not have previously existed (due to limited processing speed or scalable bandwidth requirements) may now exist economically.