Yet Another Way To Invest in Secondaries
peHUB recently laid out a number of options for investing in the very cheap secondary market, including large dedicated funds raising new pools of capital and publicly-traded funds-of-funds like Conversus Capital. Today we present one more form of secondary investing—the direct secondary. Naturally, that includes the kind of sponsor-to-sponsor deals that some LPs frown upon, but there are several firms whose entire strategy involves taking direct minority investments off PE investors hands. They call this practice “direct secondary” investing. I spoke with David Wachter, a managing director and founding partner of W Capital, one such firm based in New York. The firm is currently investing from its second fund, a $700 million pool of capital which closed $200 million above target in March 2008. Other players in the market include Vision Capital in the UK and Goldman Sachs’ secondaries fund.
