Pension funds, endowments, and private investors trust Mitt Romney's former company Bain Capital enough to hand it billions of dollars in assets.
Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.
While Wall Street firms typically underwrite offerings in teams, the lead underwriter, or manager, of the offering has primary responsibility for selling the offering and reaps much of the fees and profit.
Wall Street is at best ambivalent. The size of the accounts is nothing big. How many Wall Street firms do you know that are running after people with $5,000 accounts?
Legg Mason's structure is misunderstood by the market. Legg Mason has an affiliate model. They own 100% of their affiliates, which are investment managers such as Permal, Western Asset Management, and Royce.
Blackstone is a major client of many of the largest banks around the world.
High-frequency traders are firms all around the world. They're massive investments.
The idea that big buyside firms are going to come in and trade mano-a-mano with high-frequency trading firms shows a lack of knowledge of the business.
I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do.
I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They've financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos.
Individual participation in the stock market through 401(k)s helped fuel the go-go days of Wall Street in the 1980s and birthed asset management juggernauts like Fidelity, Vanguard, Pimco, BlackRock, and dozens of others.
The private equity world is a relatively small one. There are currently probably a few thousand professional jobs worldwide. In private equity, that's probably about all there is. So in the scheme of things, the firms are all relatively small.
