Durationsspiel: Private Equity als bestes Beispiel

In den letzten Tagen konnte man den Eindruck gewinnen, dieser Blog wandelt sich zum Klimapolitik-Kritikblog. Dem ist nicht so, es ergab sich mit Blick auf die Bundestagswahlen durch mein Studium der Parteiprogramme und den Ärger über „Studien“ wissenschaftlicher Institute als Wahlkampfhilfe.

Deshalb heute ein anderes wichtiges Thema: die Wirkung der billigen Geldpolitik auf die Vermögensmärkte und die Rolle von Private Equity. Das ist ja eines der ultimativen Duration-Games, bindet es doch das Kapital der Investoren sehr lange.

Ein weiterer Vorteil zeigt sich bei dem Umgang mit Schulden. Denn gerade in diesem Sektor spielt Leverage eine übergeordnete Rolle, wenn auch die Manager der PE-Fonds das nicht zugegeben wollen:

• „Stocks investments and private equity investments, industry-wide, have delivered about the same annual returns after fees over the past decade, when compared on a like-for-like basis. (…) One standard case for disappointment is that PE has delivered equity index-like returns recently, but also made some PE fund managers amazingly rich, and this is dumb and annoying, because the managers didn’t really do much to earn all the treasure.“ – bto: Wenn man einen Aktienfonds kauft und genauso viel mit Leverage arbeitet, könnte man eine entsprechende Rendite erzielen – ohne den PE-Fonds mit Kosten und Bindung.
• “According to Bloomberg, the average debt/ebitda ratio for companies in the S&P 600 small cap index (most PE deals involve small companies) is about 3. The average debt/ebitda ratios of PE deals, according to PitchBook, is twice that. If my maths is right (assuming an enterprise value/ebitda ratio of 13) that means that a manager could lever the equity index up by about a third and create a sort of synthetic PE — call it “leveraged equity”. That is, they could buy each dollar of the index with 70 cents of their own money, and thirty cents of margin debt. And their returns would have been better than PE over the past decade.” – bto: Der Return wäre besser gewesen. Man muss nur genauso mit Schulden arbeiten, um den PE-Manager zu schlagen.
• „This is the same as arguing that PE’s risk-adjusted returns were worse than equities, because PE is a lot more leveraged and leverage is risk. But this argument is at least partly wrong. Say there is a recession and the stock market goes down by 30 per cent. The owner of the leveraged equity portfolio gets a margin call and is wiped out. But the investor in the private equity fund gets a nice gentle markdown from the wimp of an accountant on the fund’s payroll, and their investment survives.“ – bto: Der Vorteil ist also, dass es keinen Margin Call gibt. Zwar gibt es Fälle, wo die Unternehmen so hoch verschuldet sind, dass die Gläubiger es übernehmen und den PE-Fonds rausdrücken. Im Schnitt scheint es zu funktionieren und man kann als PE-Fonds auf Zeit setzen, um doch noch einen Gewinn zu erzielen. Das galt natürlich in den letzten Jahren, in denen die Notenbanken immer gerettet haben.
• „The cash flows of the companies owned by the PE fund fall too, but cash flows are not as volatile as stock prices, making the chance of a wipeout lower. And if any of the companies in the portfolio do threaten to go bust, the fund can prop them up, either with uninvested cash, or by putting new money in — diluting the investors, but protecting them from bigger losses, if the companies eventually recover.“ – bto: Das fehlende Exposure zum Markt schützt also und erlaubt andere Maßnahmen.
• „Generalising the point, a lot of the value that PE creates (Most? All?) comes from the fact that the investors’ money is locked up for many years and the investments themselves are not marked to market. This gives the PE manager an option of when to buy, when to sell, when to invest cash, and when to pull cash out. Public companies, hostage to the share price, don’t enjoy this optionality. This optionality is valuable because it allows the PE fund to use more leverage.“ – bto: Leverage ist das Spiel in Zeiten von Notenbanksozialismus. Denn es ist risikolos, weil man immer gerettet wird.
• „Yet leverage is obviously a big contributor to PE returns, and competent management of leverage is the main way PE fund managers provide value. The industry is not always keen to point this out. In 2016, KPMG published an excellent report, written by Peter Morris, about the “value bridge” methodology of decomposing sources of return, popular with some in the PE industry. Amazingly, it leaves out leverage as a source of return almost entirely.” – bto: Natürlich nicht, denn es würde deutlich machen, dass die Manager keineswegs so super sind, wie sie denken – und deshalb auch nicht so viel Geld wert sind.
• „Here’s how it works. A PE fund buys a company for X and sells it some years later for Y. The value bridge breaks down that increase in value (Y-Z) into three parts: the increase in profits of the company while the PE firm owned it, the increase in the multiple of profits, and the amount of debt the company added or repaid, adjusted for any dividends paid to the managers. (…) The problem is it does not treat the leverage used to buy the company as a source of return. Compare this to a home purchase. If I buy a house for $1m, get an $800,000 mortgage, and later sell the house for $1.2m, I’ve doubled my money (not including interest payments). I did not double the value of the house, though. Most of the value was created by the leverage.“ – bto: Und deshalb macht es ja auch so viel Spaß, solange die Preise steigen. Und dafür, dass sie weiter steigen, sorgen schon die Notenbanken.
• „Does the heavy use of leverage by private equity mean that investors should discount the industry’s reported returns, or can PE firms manage the leverage risk away? I’m not sure. But now that the industry’s reported returns are all but indistinguishable from those available in public markets, it’s the right question for investors to ask.“ – bto: und dies besonders deshalb, weil die PE-Fonds über verschiedene Wege immer mehr Geld von kleineren Investoren einsammeln.