I received a newsletter today from a Wall Street recruiter specializing in sales, fundraising, product specialist, and investor relations professionals that discussed in great detail how rapidly Wall Street is hiring distribution teams to pursue retail/HNW individuals and their financial advisors and wealth managers. The newsletter highlighted recent hiring announcements and plans to expand distribution teams at giant asset management firms like of Ares, Neuberger Berman, Apollo, Vanguard, and Blackstone. This is a trend I do agree will only rapidly gain speed as alternative asset managers realize the growing opportunity to expose individual investors to their products and capabilities.
I saw an interview on Bloomberg TV this evening that I thought was interesting. I hadn't visited the website of Blue Owl in a few weeks and when I did I saw that Blue Owl had acquired Oak Street Real Estate Capital. I remember when I first met some of the members of the Oak Street team some years back and they have had a pretty phenomenal run in recent years and I have a lot of respect for them for having an open door policy to emerging real estate managers.
I have been very intrigued by the rapid movement of institutional capital into owning stakes in sports franchises. I plan to dedicate more coverage to this but wanted to repost an article from Institutional Investor. If you have access to folks in this space please let me know as I would like to feature them on the ATLalts podcast or on a Capital Connections & Networking Event. One interesting story from the article was that back in 2005 Game Plan teamed up with Bain Capital and bid $4.3 billion for all 30 NHL teams. That deal didn't happen but it is crazy to think that in 16 years how small that number seems today. This is especially eye opening when you see that the NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins could reportedly sell for $900 million to Fenway Sports Group.