20 July 2026

10 new episodes (8.2 hours listening) published by the 38 podcasts on the list. 2 highlight clips below (4 mins total).

Investment 20 July 2026 · 2 clips

Money Maze Podcast

Tony Yoseloff

Episode

The Golden Age of Absolute Returns? With Davidson Kempner’s Managing Partner and CIO, Tony Yoseloff

Tony Yoseloff is managing partner and chief investment officer of Davidson Kempner, which runs just under 40 billion dollars in opportunistic credit and event-driven strategies from New York, Philadelphia, the UK, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Shenzhen. He joined as a summer intern in 1998 when the firm had fewer than 15 people and about a billion dollars, and describes 40-plus years of firm experience across hundreds of bankruptcy cases worldwide.

Hosted by

Simon Brewer

23 July 2026 · 52m 09s · 2 clips below

1 of 2 contrarian

Davidson Kempner's Tony Yoseloff puts 40% of recent private equity dollars and around a third of direct corporate lending dollars into software businesses, the sector he says is now most exposed to AI.

Direct lenders follow their sponsors and sponsors bought software, so the same concentration sits on both sides of the capital structure. Public portfolios took the equivalent hit and covered it with AI exposure, which is why the index is near highs; a buyout fund or a direct lending fund has no such offset, because in private markets AI sits in venture and growth rather than in leveraged buyouts.

1m 25s · from 21:58
My observations
- Opportunistic credit buys these loans at a discount and it is what he runs, so his diagnosis and his book point the same way. The concentration figures come from published industry data, so a sceptical allocator can check them without taking his word for anything.
- A board holding private equity alongside public equity on the assumption they diversify each other should look at the sector overlap first. The AI exposure that rescued the public sleeve is absent from the private one, and the software exposure sits in both.
- Yoseloff does not call the asset class flawed, only larger than the set of borrowers available to lend to. That is a capacity argument, and it points at vintage rather than at manager.
- private-markets
- ai-and-markets
2 of 2 framework

Tony Yoseloff argues the private equity backlog clears slowly by design, because an 8% preferred return and the need to raise the next fund both pay a manager to wait.

Realising an investment hands capital back and forces a fundraise, which is the reverse of an absolute return book that compounds what it earns. Set that against covenant-light documents, covering about 90% of public market deals and by his read most recent private ones, and a sponsor holding a loan that fails its coverage tests faces no deadline at all.

2m 09s · from 26:35
My observations
- Yoseloff expects both the number and the size of private equity firms to contract, with the survivors barbelled at the two ends. Fundraising closes show that before distributions do, so a middle-market firm that cannot close a fund is the earlier read.
- The 8% hurdle behaves like an option once a fund sits below it: the manager gains from waiting and from taking more risk, which makes this a governance question for the limited partner rather than a timing one.
- Some sponsor-owned businesses are large beneficiaries of the AI capex and will get multiple back, which he says plainly while holding that the industry as a whole will not. Whether a given fund owns any of them is a holdings question, not a vintage question.
- private-markets
- governance

20 July 2026

Investment 20 July 2026 · 2 clips

Davidson Kempner's Tony Yoseloff puts 40% of recent private equity dollars and around a third of direct corporate lending dollars into software businesses, the sector he says is now most exposed to AI.

Tony Yoseloff argues the private equity backlog clears slowly by design, because an 8% preferred return and the need to raise the next fund both pay a manager to wait.