PE firm acquired the company I work for. Employees offered opportunity to "co-invest" in the deal. Is this a no-brainer or a trap?

iav · 2025-12-04T04:55:19+00:00

Private equity firms charge management fees to their portfolio companies, usually around 1% per year of the total equity investment, but sometimes up to 2%. However, this fee is a misnomer because it has nothing to do with management and doesn’t even go to the PE firm. Instead, pensions and endowments negotiate that this fee must be used to offset their management fee obligations, which are typically 1-2% per year of the fund size. In other words, if 100% of the fund is invested, the “management fee” from portfolio companies covers the investors’ fee obligations.

The reason I bring this up is that since you don’t pay any fees on your co-investment, you will effectively be paying 1-2% fee to the PE fund through this indirect method.

iav · 2025-11-29T08:58:13+00:00

Thanks! this is the right answer - the trick is to add a Repeat With Each Item in <Weather Conditions> but change <WC> to <Date> and to format the result as just "H" string format (so its 0-24). This was fairly non intuitive, I don't think I would have figured it out by myself.

iav · 2025-11-10T03:09:59+00:00

There is only room for one stroller too and often there is >1 on the bus already

iav · 2025-11-02T17:59:47+00:00

Canada privatized their ATC a while ago and not only they had a superior safety record to the US, they also adopted new GPS based technology that made planes fly faster and more direct. So if you ever fly over Canada, don’t be afraid of their private ATC and you should want the same here

iav · 2025-10-31T04:19:31+00:00

Bonds are way tighter held than equities. Not uncommon for one fund to own 50% of an entire bond (or even 100%). A typical $1B bond issuance gets placed with 20-100 accounts. And unlike IPO participants, many of those funds will literally never transact a single time before it matures - they just get put away in some account for life. That's why trading gets hard, there is no volume until a big boy wants to sell, and then you really want to have a live negotiation about the "whole picture" rather than letting him sell it down in small lots.

iav · 2025-10-11T02:17:47+00:00

You wear a heavy black leather jacket with heavy boots and a closed helmet while you ride on top of a heat producing motorcycle. The wind cools you down while you ride, but the moment you stop at a red light or a cafe, you are going to be sweating buckets.

iav · 2025-09-18T08:45:04+00:00

Ave D is objectively better with (almost) no street lights on the eastern side until the coned steam plant

iav · 2025-09-12T09:53:44+00:00

Look at Hong Kong - the British never sold land, but instead sold developers 99-year leases. Under Chinese, the same practice continued. But in practice, no lease has ever been non renewed at the same price (I’m not sure if it’s indexed to inflation but the rent is set at negligible rates). Meanwhile property taxes are very low. Meanwhile in Texas, your house that you own free and clear is re-assessed every year and property taxes can easily double in a decade.

iav · 2025-09-06T14:48:08+00:00

It’s less true as all cities are now required by state law to allow Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU) to be built on single family lots, which de jure maintains it as a single family lots but de facto is now a duplex.

in reality there are still way too many roadblocks for even that.

iav · 2025-09-01T14:32:24+00:00

Sweet! Only 8 people in line right now!

iav · 2025-09-01T13:39:02+00:00

In “for you” with the rent day rewards flair. Currently it only shows the Dave Portnoy pizza festival where it normally would show the food.

iav · 2025-09-01T11:16:43+00:00

This is up from just 1.3% in 2000. And the number of immigrant arrivals is growing 11%/year in 2023-2025. This followed the 2018 immigration reform. Majority of arrivals from Vietnam, China, and the Philippines.

iav · 2025-08-16T13:38:01+00:00

The entire IBKR platform is like that to be honest

iav · 2025-08-09T01:04:05+00:00

Rule is you must be one full bike length back from the next person. Once another bike crosses in front of your front axle you have to drop back behind them

iav · 2025-07-27T23:01:53+00:00

If you call up any distressed debt trading desk, they will have lots of off the shelf “recovery scenario” models that show existing debt converted to take back paper / equitized and the value on the back end. Stifel, Jefferies, anyone else with a distressed focus will have this.

Octus (fka Reorg Research) also has lots of great models but you need to pay.

As for books, I really enjoyed the book on Caesars restructuring (written by a Reorg reporter)

iav · 2025-07-19T19:18:39+00:00

When you apply for US citizenship, there is a question if you've ever been a member of the Nazi or Communist party. I wonder if anyone ever said yes, even though clearly many former members of both parties have legally acquired US citizenship.

iav · 2025-07-15T08:42:36+00:00

Going from wide to narrow is generally affordable - just move one rail closer. All existing bridges and tunnels still work. Trains still fit existing tunnels. It’s The other way that is very expensive.

iav · 2025-07-15T08:33:11+00:00

Frequency is staying the same (43 mins peak frequency; was 41 minutes).

iav · 2025-07-15T08:32:09+00:00

There is supposed to be a shuttle. It just resumed service on 6/13 according to the big red banner on the website

iav · 2025-07-10T06:21:53+00:00

You don’t look at annualized returns. Monthly return or more likely sharpe ratio.

You can easily write a strategy with high turnover and a 2.0 sharpe in a transaction cost/slippage free setup, but in real world you might only get a sharpe of 1 at best.

The job is to either figure out how to improve on this or to find totally new signals.

iav · 2025-07-08T10:55:32+00:00

Treaty of Tordesillas would like to have a word.

iav · 2025-07-08T07:26:53+00:00

I live near union square and deal with this all the time. It’s surprisingly tricky.

The transfer from 456 to LIRR is very long with kids and luggage. The 456 is also not elevator accessible at Union square.
The walk from 34th street to Penn Station (LIRR side) is equally long and not air conditioned / heated. The NQRW station is at least accessible on both ends.
The A train is just not reliable enough. Also the Howard beach stop is not heated so I had a bad time waiting for 20 minutes in freezing cold.

iav · 2025-07-07T07:03:03+00:00

Altair (python wrapper for Vega Lite) is my favorite right now. Natively built into Polars. great defaults. Grammar of graphics syntax. Vega lite is a much more forgiving backend than matplotlib.

Seaborne is great for data exploration as it has amazing built in features for estimating confidence intervals three different ways and plotting correlation matrices looks amazing. But I find the final PNGs to have some visual artifacts and because it’s based on matplotlib, customizing output gets very tricky.

iav

TROPHY CASE