Rockefeller University’s $2.7 billion endowment is in the process of selling some private credit funds amid an uptick in investors clamoring for assets in the growing market.
“I am actually in a secondary sale to sell some private credit funds, which were actually getting good value,” Paula Volent, the New York-based educational institution’s chief investment officer, said at Bloomberg’s Women, Money & Power conference in London on Dec. 9.
The veteran investor who oversees the endowment runs a diversified portfolio with two-thirds in alternative investments, and the rest in venture capital, private equity, global macro hedge funds and real estate. She said that while liquidity in private markets is a “big issue,” some planned IPOs such as those of Klarna Bank are pointing to some greenshoots in the public markets.
Investors around the world have piled on private credit, which has doubled in size from 2019 to become about a $1.7 trillion industry. But they have been grappling with an illiquid market even as regulators grow concerned about some of these products potentially causing financial instability.
Private equity and venture capital have been a drag on the endowment’s performance in the past couple of years, Volent said.
Asked about China, Volent — recently back from Hong Kong — said that her pessimism has now turned into optimism despite all the geopolitical tensions because the country is part of a “great supply chain” with many “interesting companies.”
On the same panel at the event, Malin Norberg of Norway’s $1.8 trillion sovereign wealth fund, Norges Bank Investment Management, said that she saw potential in real estate as the expectation gap between sellers and buyers starts to close and transactions begin to pick up.
NBIM is the world’s biggest single owner of public equities, with shares in almost 9,000 companies globally. It was established in the 1990s to invest Norway’s oil riches and is largely an index-tracker, working according to a strict mandate from the country’s Finance Ministry. It has achieved an annual return of about 6% over the quarter of a century during which it’s existed.
