BUILDING AN ASIAN CITADEL SECONDARY GROWTH

Bloomberg reports on Kurt Baker prepping a large new multimanager fund, 30th Century Partners. If he achieves his target raise of $3 billion, this will become one of the biggest fund launches of the past few years. Baker, the former head of Morgan Stanley's Asia Prime Brokerage business and ex-Millennium Management, is aiming for a launch date of June 2024. His goal is to emulate Citadel, with almost a dozen investment teams trading in Southeast Asia and Australia.

Given the high costs and extensive structures involved in setting up a multimanager fund, these launches are rare, so we will watch this one with great interest to see how he gets on.

As well as seeing plenty of new private credit funds, secondaries funds continue to trend. Most recently, Goldman Sachs has successfully raised $14.2 billion for its flagship secondaries fund, Vintage IX, which is above their target. Beyond Vintage IX, Goldman also successfully added a further $1 billion to their Vintage Infrastructure Partners fund, which takes their total secondaries business assets to over $45 billion.

Another way to gain exposure to the space is to buy into a secondaries fund manager, which is exactly what Carmignac and General Atlantic have done, having both taken ‘strategic’ stakes in Clipway as well as backing its first $4 billion fund.