Rob Mannix

Markets in recent months have offered up a reminder of the difficulty of modelling risk in private assets. Advances in artificial intelligence that triggered a selloff in software companies in January and February - the so-called SaaSpocalypse - are likely to hurt private funds more than many investors expected. Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and endowments have invested heavily in private assets in recent years.

By BlackRock's most expensive acquisition in 2025 was the $12 billion purchase of private markets investment house HPS Investment Partners. But the firm's most significant recent buy, chief executive Larry Fink told attendees at RBC's Global Financial Institutions conference in New York in March, could turn out to be Preqin, the private markets data business. BlackRock hopes the purchase of Preqin for

By Alexis Maubourget thinks investors are underestimating structural risks in the market that he believes could become "existential". Maubourguet and his colleagues at Swiss hedge fund Adapt Investment Managers have written a 40-page note, billed as a "holistic analysis of recent shifts in risk distribution across the financial system", that sets out seven ways markets have changed that the authors