Navigating the Wild West of Private Markets: Insights from Nick Fusco of ApeVue
In this episode Nick Fusco, co-founder of ApeVue, talks about the dynamic world of private markets. From the rise of credit funds to the evolving landscape of equity valuations, Nick provides a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities in this often-overlooked sector. Discover the significance of long-duration plays, the role of data on AI models, and the intriguing developments in fund finance. Gain insights into ApeVue’s index benchmarks and how they contribute to a holistic understanding of private market dynamics. Don't miss this conversation that explores the complexities of asset allocation in private markets and the challenges associated with accurately measuring volatility in the space. Is there a fat pitch in private markets? Listen and find out.
RECORDED DECEMBER 4, 2023
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Fat Pitch Ep 15 Nick Fusco - AUDIO
Tue, Dec 19, 2023 12:00 PM • 32:13
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
market, private, funds, companies, ai, index, products, volatility, liquidity, data, public, day, performance, transparency, pricing, price, year, derivatives, absolutely, microsoft
SPEAKERS
Paul Barausky, Nick Fusco, Clint Sorenson
Paul Barausky 00:04
Well hello everyone and welcome to the Fat Pitch podcast. I'm your host, as always, Paul Barausky from Sealy Investment Securities, and I'm joined by my co host, Clint Sorenson, Clint, why don’t you tell everybody who our guest is this week?
Clint Sorenson 00:18
Yeah, we got Nick Fusco really pumped about him being on the call. I've had the privilege of getting to know him on another podcast. He's brilliant, very exciting topics today. We're gonna be talking about the private stock market rather, and really what his specialty is. So Nick, thanks for joining us today. Very excited to have you on.
Nick Fusco 00:37
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Clint Sorenson 00:38
So Nick, give our audience a little bit of your background. Right. I got to know you. But tell us where he came from, where you grew up. Tell us about yourself, your family. What do you do for a living? Give us the story.
Nick Fusco 00:48
Sure thing. Yeah, I mean, I grew up not too far away from New York. Never thought I would end up there. But I'd say that the origin story for me might start when I was pretty young, like 10 or 12. My father got me into investing for some reason, because I guess that's what you do with your 10 or 12 year old you don't play baseball you… weird podcast to say that, right? But you teach about investing. And I started looking at stocks until I could earn enough money to buy new toys and things like that, read the back of a label on a toy, see what the hell I should be buying next. Who's the producer? Where's it imported from. By the time I was 16, I started looking at derivatives. So looking at options, and then ended up going to college up in Connecticut and then realized that the school I was at didn't have enough derivative courses. So I had to take some summer courses in California, up in Boston. And then by the time I graduated, I knew I wanted to be in opaque markets or OTC markets. So that's like the quick and dirty on my background. I know it sounds pretty boring, but...
Paul Barausky 01:50
The most unique origin story I've heard. The kid reading the back of his toy to see if he should bet on the manufacturer. But where'd you go to school in Connecticut? One of my nephew's is up at Sacred Heart on a visit with the track team today.
Nick Fusco 02:05
Okay, so I rode against Sacred Heart. I went to Trinity in Hartford,
Clint Sorenson 02:10
That’s where Ryan went. Paul, Ryan played basketball for Trinity. So one of our really good friends played basketball for Trinity, which is interesting.
Paul Barausky 02:21
The kid would probably end up rowing–I mean, running track at St. Joe's in Philly, because his brother’s rowing for St. Joe's out of Philly on scholarship. So yeah, I'm out of the Northeast. Now I'm in the Lone Star State. So all that time I spent being born in Connecticut, and growing up in the Northeast is now for naught. So I can wax philosophical with guys like you. So once you do that, you get out of school and you get into those OTC Markets. How does that career take you to what you're doing now? What's tell us about your firm and what you're actually doing on the day to day?
Nick Fusco 02:57
Sure, so I'll start at the tail end. What we're doing right now is bringing transparency to the private stock markets. Effectively, these are big names that maybe have an IPO or have just recently IPO’d–your Instacart you know, that's now a public company. But SpaceX, Reddit, Discord, Epic Games, these are not so public companies, right. But there's still a lot of activity. And up until I want to say in part that we launched there wasn't really a central or independent resource to share where pricing activity is performance of those companies have been even where it could sit in an asset allocation model, that sort of thing. So we were the first independent provider of pricing and index data in that space, which is a pretty exciting spot. But given where I ended up after college for the last almost 20 years, it's always been in those opaque markets of asset backed securities, credit default swaps, CDs, written on ABS syndicated loans Clos I did watch the podcast with Clark Briner. That was pretty up my wheelhouse. I liked that for private credit. But yeah, I think this is an underserved market in a lot of ways. So that's where really where we, we took our aim more recently.
Paul Barausky 04:06
So are you strictly equities now? Or are you still involved in credit and debt also?
Nick Fusco 04:10
Yeah, so my credit days are a little bit more over, at least for now. But we're purely focused on VC backed companies at this stage.
Paul Barausky 04:18
Okay. The reason I asked is I was listening to a speaker two weeks ago. It's always interesting when everyone wants to go to the same party. Why don't you two guess how many new credit funds have been launched in the last 12 months, give or take 20. Three hundred and forty. Those are ones just big enough to hit my radar is sort of a packaged product type of guy. I'm sure there's plenty of little ones too. So what does it look like? You know, I mentioned what you do. So what's a week in the life of Nick all about?
Nick Fusco 04:50
Yeah, and I'll just hit on that point of the 300-plus credit funds being launched. A lot of that content off of the performance of the equity in some regards, as well. I know they're very new Many different types of varieties. And a lot could be LBO or real estate related and things of that nature. But when you have such a decline in some of the equity holdings, or the valuations of these companies, who stands to make the most money and get paid back first is going to be your debt holders, right? I would say when we look at the day in the life or the week in the life, there's always going to be a half a day dedicated to someone asking things in and around the the debt component, how that stacks up in the waterfall, or what are you doing there, we can't price our middle market very well, things of that nature. So that's going to be part of it, always part of the picture.
And painting that holistic picture for us, I mean, the three core products from ApeVue, and ApeVue stands for a private equity view, by the way. Despite the Ape name, we do appreciate having a mascot, but it will center around the core products, right? It's pricing. So we want to tell you how much Epic Games is worth. It’s benchmarking, because we want to tell you, how does Epic Games stack up against its peer group, or when there's a new Epic Games, Epic Games, 2.0, that doesn't have as much information, we can look to reference data, which is the third pillar, understand what has been raised today, understand where those prices were, and then benchmark that against its peer companies. So across those three pillars, it's anything from how do we keep building on these core product sets, to now who's going to want to buy these, who wants to buy these data, because data drives everything, right? Data is going to drive your models, your AI models, your generic, your just visuals to help sell something, and then that's kind of the last bit we're constantly selling, you know, we're abutting, kind of two and a half, three years at this, we need to be really engaging with our clients and prospects and, and working through the value proposition and making sure there's a good fit for not only just the asset class, but the nuanced end of data that we've got here. And I think we've done a pretty good job of hitting various different user types. And as well as the press, I mean, there's a disruptive nature to this, of showing that the private markets can outperform public markets. Of showing that, you know, no one wanted to see the market was coming off, or no one wanted to see that there was volatility in this space. And he was really one of the first to pick that up. So we talked about Shien in the podcast, and I'm on with Clint just today. And we were in the FT talking about Shien, a year ago, you're in The Economist showing that the market was down before any of the big funds were marking down a year and a bit ago, you know, it's pretty wild stuff. And I would almost liken it to the Wild West, or maybe how the loans market was 20 years ago, when everyone just kind of marked originally the PAR. And then they realized, you know, secondary market matters. And that's what we encourage; the secondary market really matters here.
Clint Sorenson 07:45
I love that you have the transparency, too, because that's needed that it just helps in terms of the quality of the inputs we're getting. So walk us through how your customers use the data, right? Give us some various use cases of how your customers or what prospective customers, how they would use ApeVue to make better decisions, etcetera.
Nick Fusco 08:03
Sure, I mean, the obvious but one of the most small use cases, starting with your your cradle to grave is going to be price discovery. Where the hell’s the price? And then if you can get a sense of where something is going to be priced, you factor in best execution. And given we tailor towards more institutional investors, right? The idea is, if you could save 50 basis points on a trade by having a better understanding of where it's priced, that might pay for the entire service for the year. You know, and then thereafter, you go into valuation models, so you want to use it as an input to valuation taking market activity. So you're fair value level two, as opposed to model driven, which is level three. So then your compliance folks or your risk folks are going to be happy too. And thereafter, we get used more at the tail end for audit, reconciliation, things of that nature. And then that you start that loop again, where now the research guys wake up, and they say, Oh, we can use this too, this is cool. And then that could promote, again, price discovery, and we start again. So those are kind of your core use cases. But we're seeing everything right down to creating new markets in the lending space. Because, you know, if I'm sitting on 10 million of SpaceX shares, I want to borrow against it now. I want to put my house up as collateral, SpaceX shares as collateral, and my public portfolios as collateral, right. And that can all change your leverage, you know, change some of your lending rates, it's going to be rather prolific in the ways that these assets and these holdings could get used in the future for sure.
Clint Sorenson 09:29
Huge gap in the industry, Paul.You know, that's a huge gap, right, like–
Paul Barausky 09:35
I mean, I was thinking about just the ability to borrow and lever against I mean, forget private individual holdings like that. It's even difficult for a lot of financial institutions against large private funds, like the real estate funds that I'm involved in much less the single
Nick Fusco 09:51
Your Navin fund finance.
Paul Barausky 09:54
Yeah, do you believe that that's a big future area of growth for the overall industry? And where are the pitfalls in that? I'm curious. We know what the benefits obviously are.
Nick Fusco 10:04
You guys always talked about origin story. And I love that. One of the first things that I worked on my my first day, yeah, I think it was the first day on the job. Twenty something years old was managing the creation and performance and monitoring of the ABX index, you ever heard of that? Diminished by the market. And it was used in the movie, The Big Short, right, Michael Lewis. It was a basket, a synthetic basket of mortgage-backed securities to short the housing market. Pretty frickin cool to give to a 22-year old. But I think these are the sorts of things that might end up getting created down the road in our space as well. Because I think when once you combine–what is it, combining leverage with incompetence, you can really create a big problem. But I think all the direction you're going for fund finance, or Nav finance is super important. Because let's say that you're your a GP that wants to get some good IRR and pay back some of the investors and you're going to borrow against the portfolio to do it. And you're putting up all these assets as collateral that are potentially really good. And you're just going to speed up your distributions. Or maybe they're really bad. And you're putting bad after bad. And I think that could be the nature of where some of these funds are going to go to boost up performance and to speed up distributions, they're going to create what's called a CFO and, and this is going to be collateralized fund obligation, right. And those can then be sold off to, let's say, credit funds from some of the other private equity guys. So imagine you're an LP sitting here, and you're like, Oh, cool, I'm getting some of these distributions back. But I might end up landing some issues down the road, and I'm just kind of kicking the can. But I'm also invested in this cool credit fund over here, and they're getting great returns. But then if some of this starts to blow up, and there's some issues with the collateral, me as the LP or the LP are gonna get blown up on both sides. So it could really proliferate the issue of a risk transfer, where you're just creating this new cycle of offloading risk within the Nav of the fund collateral type structures.
Paul Barausky 12:13
That’s just the lens to look at it. That's my question.
Clint Sorenson 12:16
Definitely a pitfall Paul, but I mean, you think about it something. And we always tend to do this right; I hate to play Wall Street's to start, think it's just human nature. But if you think about it, we start with something that's designed to allow maybe the retail holder who wants you know, public markets are shrinking in size, they want to own some of these private market companies. And then they're like, Hey, I don't want to have the opportunity cost of keeping all this cash on deck or liquidity. So I'm going to invest it knowing that I can just borrow on those high quality quote-unquote investments, and then use that for liquidity if I happen to need some. I think that's a great role in the marketplace that something like this could help provide. And it's a big gap that at least I see it in my world following we're representing, you know, working with advisors who work with wealthy families or whatnot. They need liquidity at times that pops up and they don't want to go liquidate investments. They just said, Hey, let me borrow in this long term investment, there's an arbitrage; there's an opportunity there, they take into account opportunity cost. And I think this can be awesome, right. So we're able to provide the transparency and the pricing to allow for bigger releases. Because right now also ending number one is hard to come by. But it's like a 10% release. Think about it if you could just by providing transparency and a stable and stable market pricing allow lenders to become comfortable and build these marketplaces to lend even higher amounts of leverage not to lever up the portfolio to essentially assist with liquidity, but then again.
Nick Fusco
Yeah, absolutely.
Paul Barausky 13:47
So I have a question because not everybody that listens to the Fat Pitch necessarily comes from the financial world, or has a lot of acumen and they have a lot of curiosity.
Nick Fusco
Yeah, you just dragged that one straight to the weeds, Paul. I love it. That's pretty neat.
Paul Barausky 14:04
All my favorite quotes from Charlie Munger, who basically insults most accounting, derivatives, intelligence, so you can have acumen that's okay. You ought to hear me talk about real estate folks who are doing poorly now. I said, this market separates enthusiasts from operators real quickly. So my question is, every conference I go to these days, a lot of financial advisors say the number one alternative product type they're interested in is secondaries because they just think that Hey, everything's on sale. So tell me, Nick, from your perspective, what's the problem with that right now?
Nick Fusco 14:44
On sale versus what? I think is the–
Paul Barausky 14:47
I was hoping you would say that.
Nick Fusco 14:51
Well, you sent me the email right before today. No, but when you look at the market, I mean, a lot of these companies are at a discount to their last round, but when a lot of them are at a discount to their last round, guess what? That pricing is incorrect. And I think what we've found is I even have a client that’s brought this up to me. And he said, You know what, I bought into my funds rather than him, right? He's the LP, my fund bought into this position in the secondary market and got a 20% discount and remarked it the next day to the last drop in price. That's fraud, what's going on. And I guess his fund manager got really pissed off at him, right? Because naturally, you don't wanna be called up or something like that. But if but if actually, you've executed the trade at certain price isn't that trade–shouldn't that have some weight or reliability. I mean, certainly, we take that into account, substantive here where we observe traded—
Paul Barausky 15:45
That’s why I posed the question to you because this is at the heart of what you do at ApeVue is looking for correct valuation. And a lot of different input goes into that. Whereas I heard an extremely large manager, not just a buyer, it was a salesperson from the manager, say, Yeah, look, how do you lose? You markup on that next statement, and boom, you're back up here. And it just, it just didn't feel right to me.
Nick Fusco 16:13
Yeah. Well, I mean, Paul, when you buy a bond at 80 cents on the dollar, what do you mark it at the next day?
Paul Barausky
Good point.
Nick Fusco 16:19
There's definitely some misunderstanding here. Because if you look back historically, mark to market here has traditionally been where is the last round, and managers will carry those valuations for as long as possible. And what we've realized is, the last round is stale. And we're solving for that sale price issue. Because financing has also become an issue in the last few years, when you're going to back to market to raise capital, everyone was so fearful at the companies, the startups themselves at a down round. So now you have a lot of these private credit funds. Now you're bringing me back in the weeds, I love it. But you're having a lot of the private credit funds come in and create these more interesting structures, to maybe soften the blow of that down round, now it's still going to be down, the equity price will be down. But maybe there are certain nuances or aspects to in and around that about, we've got some warrants in here, we've got a particularly convertible component that makes it look a little bit better, publicly, you know, there's a combination of the equity and the debt, you know, but at the end of the day, you're, you're really having to understand the full structure and how those different tranches make out. So given your background in the real estate space, think about almost structure products, or structured finance, where you have those various tranches, the triple A's that have short duration and long duration, then you've got your mezzanine tranches that are all a little bit different and subordinated to each other at different cut offs. Actually, this shouldn't be that different. So I love that I came at this market with a structured products lens, and now fallen into it and realize that the nuances that are required to operate between the different common and preferred shares and their liquidation preferences and all the covenants that are internal to it, so. So yeah, it's not a sure thing, by any stretch, you need to have as much data as possible to really navigate those markets. For sure.
Clint Sorenson 18:10
Nick, talk about your indexes that you create because I think this is really cool as well. So how many indexes do you have you guys created? What's the most common one? What do–how do people use them?
Nick Fusco 18:22
Sure, the pure count, we've got a dozen that are relatively useful, I would say we have more that are less useful. But of those dozen, it's going to go through the top private companies that are kind of active in entertainment, or FinTech data products. And the biggest benchmark that we have is the APU 50. So these are the most active 50 companies in the secondary markets; it's typically going to be your biggest companies that are active in the secondary market as well. There's a slow rotation in that, but it's very much geared towards U.S. companies is very much geared towards tech forward, because a lot of the companies that have grown to unicorn status are tech forward in nature, but it's performed with substantially more volatility than anyone would would really expect over the last few years. And that's kind of what we thought we would see as a thesis when we were starting the company. But those are going to be used for anything about, How does my portfolio compare? Or How can I help price an asset that's been really hard to value historically to get in? We expect in the future, it'll also be a component to asset allocation to better understand what's available in the private market space. Because I think when you take a step back and you say, Oh, asset allocation model, 60% equity, 40% bonds, What is it? Is it Ford Motor Company on both sides? Or are we going to get more granular to say, What is the equity? Is it public or is it private? within the private component, what sectors are we really focused on? Within those sectors, are we looking at early stage, mid stage or late stage? You know, I don't think anyone takes that proper view unless they bring in maybe a service like yours, Clint, but you need to really understand what is actually out there in the investable universe before kind of just saying, Oh, yeah, I've got it covered. My portfolio is doing just fine. That's kind of the angle on our index benchmarks. And they're nice to compare the individual stocks to as well.
Clint Sorenson 20:14
How’s the AP 50 weighted? you are cap weighted, equally weighted? How you weigh index if it's not proprietary.
Nick Fusco 20:21
Yeah, so we looked at both. But we realized that the market cap weighting would just get completely dominated by your names like a ByteDance, or SpaceX. Absolutely. So we went with an equal weighting, which is relatively common, and certainly the other areas of fixed income that I've worked in before. And then we went with a gentle rotation of the constituents. So at any given month, we always focus on the 50 most active names, but the churn of those names could only operate at the bottom quartile. So the bottom 25% can rotate in or out on a monthly basis, but the top 75% is always going to remain.
Paul Barausky 20:57
So that gives you a little more stability to it?
Nick Fusco 21:01
Exactly, right.
Clint Sorenson 21:02
And how's the AP 50 performed this year?
Nick Fusco 21:05
Ooh, let's take a look at
Paul Barausky
There he goes, let’s go
Nick Fusco 21:12
Year to date, we are up about 16 plus percent.
Paul Barausky 21:17
Okay. In light of a lot of other things, that's pretty stellar.
Nick Fusco 21:20
Absolutely.
Paul Barausky 21:23
Very interesting. So question for you. You obviously, when a guy starts looking at stocks at 12, I assume your father was in the industry in some way, shape, or form. But when a guy starts looking at stocks at 12, derivatives at 16, transfers universities for more options classes, he's got to have an eye on the future, too. So, you know, you looking at our industry and the dramatic changes over the last decade, what do you see coming down the pike or what do you think should be coming down the pike with your view of the world?
Nick Fusco 21:54
Sure. I mean, it's more of a holistic, it's anyone that can play the game with long duration. So as long as you're not needing to jump in and out of the market every day, I think your long duration plays are going to do really, really well. Very bullish on data. Because, I mean, that's the lifeblood of what we do at ApeVue, but at the same time, data is what's going to power AI. And when I'm looking at public versus private, guess what a lot of these private companies are focused on AI. And the public companies are just catching up or acquiring them to play the game. So when you look at something like scale AI, which is the data behind powering up the models for a ChatGPT or others, right? That's a double this year. If you're looking at open AI, that's up in excess of 200%. If you're looking at anthropic, guess what, you're up like 700 plus percent this year. So there are these crazy spikes that you're gonna get out of the private markets that are just, if you hit it, right, you're gonna kill it. But at the end of the day, I also think the big winners are always going to be Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Because every time you get involved in churning out and utilizing so much data, compute and store, compute and store, they're always gonna be the winners. I don't think anyone's coming out for them, you know, in a truly capable sense.
Paul Barausky 23:20
There's a moat around their castles, every one of them. Do you have any opinion on this whole thing with Sam Altman and OpenAI and Microsoft and that whole soap opera over the past few weeks?
Nick Fusco 23:34
As soon as I open my mouth, something will change. Very interesting. You know, the the year to day performance of Microsoft, and OpenAI largely mirror each other up until October, you know. The returns were almost dead on within 5%. Really, really interesting. And then October came, just–cat was out of the bag, here we go, market skyrocketed. And then all of a sudden, there was something at play. Now we could have an issue like what we had at OpenAI. And it's since retreated from those highs, right? But I think that no matter what happens, Microsoft will win. Doesn't matter which way it goes. So that's where I think this is really kind of a clever play from their perspective. They've got their hooks into absolutely everything and they played it really, really well. You know. IBM dropped the ball, many moons ago.
Clint Sorenson 24:28
Oh yeah, they were like first–they jumped in with the whole Watson thing, and you thought they were going to be kind of the leader in this space, yeah; you're right about the Microsoft play there.
Nick Fusco 24:38
Yeah. What do you think? I'd love to see the crystal ball, you guys.
Clint Sorenson 24:43
You know what I think about this. We talked about it. I think it was poor, really bad governance. I think Microsoft does look good in it. But I think it was just terrible governance to have that happen the way it happened with a company that size–Microsoft, the PR. I mean could you imagine the amount of fury in the Microsoft executive team when that's happening behind the scenes–I couldn't imagine just because it was just a PR nightmare to happen and go over the weekend with all the saga and all that, the petitions. And it was just very messy for a company that was really doing well and operating on a great stride and making huge exponential leaps in AI the way we consider AI. And so I think it was just a complete fumbling from the board's perspective. So hopefully they cleaned that up. That's my opinion.
But I want to talk about your index from an asset allocation perspective because this is something we've run into issues. And Paul, you know, we run this issue in real estate a lot, right? Well, we were talking about private market indices, we're trying to model those for investors. And let's take the volatility laundering to the side, which hopefully, you'll help us solve with your transparency. That’s a pat to Dr. Asness, who talked about private market, volatility laundering, because the volatility no quote is a lot lower than public markets, etc. But when you think about that from an asset allocation perspective, we've always found it very difficult, right? We've written papers about allocating your private businesses, private markets having to be a part of your allocation, not just private equity funds or venture capital, but the indices available, have not been that great for us to be able to really build a composite of how someone might invest in the space. And I feel like this late stage space that you focus on is really important to being able to model that with volatility characteristics that are closer to reality, is going to really help people allocate more to the space. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, you might agree with me, but that's kind of my thoughts. Like I was talking to a University of Dallas the other day, and I had to like, give them the background about why the volatility figure, and I'm not going to name the name of the index provider of this VC index, why that volatility was not accurate, right? Because it was reporting a volatility that was a third of stocks. I was like, alright, half of stocks is like, no, that's, that's not true. So what we kind of how you see that?
Nick Fusco 27:07
Okay, well, your 90 day volatility on open AI right now is 87%. There you go. There's a fun stat. But I think it starts with, there are a couple of different providers out there in the space. And I don't want to name names, but I truly think that the way those the index products are managed, be that they're buyside driven, is not the most effective path, right? Because you're able to say, Okay, well, this is the performance of our funds. And then you get a whole bunch of other funds saying, this is the performance of my fund, and you put it together, and you say, That's the truth, I think, really, the truth is where active market activity will happen. So when we're looking at the definition, almost with fair value, or what someone that's looking at US GAAP really cares about a kind of ASEA 20 type valuation, they're going to say, give me your best estimate of mid market. And this is really where you're having bids, offers, and trades that are not under any sort of distress type scenario. And I think that's the most important aspects that completely lost on a buyside driven index product. So that's what we focus on, right. And the performance and the volatility is inherent in it. And we could do, I don't think the volatility of the index makes all that much sense. But you when you stack up the volatility of the underlying constituents, it's high. It's way higher than anyone would actually expect. But this is back to one of my investment thesis that you're asking for. It's the long duration, you know, it pays off over time, that performance is truly going to be there. But you're paying for it through volatility, right. So that's that perspective on the existing index products in the space and the volatility component.
Paul Barausky 28:47
Interesting. I like the fact that you think about the duration of it, too, because I don't know if you rewind the clock. There's a lot of folks that just thought I can get into these private companies. I'm going back 20 years, I can make a pop, I'm out, you know, and it's changed to the people are private, bigger, longer than anyone ever imagined maybe two decades ago. And so that duration, from your vantage point has to be your friend in this market, or else getting whipsawed is pretty much a reality.
Nick Fusco 29:18
Absolutely. And we're kind of seeing it as the private stock market at this point, right? Because it's taking significantly longer, perhaps double the amount of time to IPO if a company even chooses to IPO because there's better financing in the private markets right now, you know, then than there's ever been 10 or 20 years ago. I mean, certainly the last two years have not been terribly friendly, right. But if you want to stay private, there are great advantages to that. And then you see public companies going private. I don't just mean like a Twitter scenario, but I think it becomes a viable path. When when you can have that both liquidity and proper finance in the market itself.
Clint Sorenson 29:58
Say take us out of here. I’m going to sum it up and say that the fat pitch here, Nick, and you can agree with me if I’m off base, you can fix it. The fat pitch is to have a long view in the private stock market. Is that a good summary?
Nick Fusco 30:10
That would be my fat pitch at the moment for sure.
Clint Sorenson 30:14
Awesome. So tell us how tell our crowd how they can get in touch with you, how they can follow you. What's your Twitter handle? And they follow you on LinkedIn, how they learn more about ApeVue. And again, thank you for your time today.
Nick Fusco 30:24
Yeah,sure. You can look for me on LinkedIn, but I can't manage my inbox anymore. So best I’ll give you is the Twitter handle @TheFuscoKid. And we're @VueApe on Twitter as well. But yeah, check out apevue.com. Find a little bit more–we've got a weekly newsletter that pumps out as well. So happy to share any of that with anyone that reaches out. But I mean, this is a super viable market that's really lesser known to the broader investment world. So the more the merrier in here, I would say. The water's warm.
Paul Barausky 30:56
Well, super exciting, and I think don't sell it short. I think every week that goes by it gets more visible and more exciting and more participants. And I know as an armchair investor and a lot of this type of stuff, I'm just the dumb real estate guy. You know, it's really valuable to talk to folks like you, read what you're writing, see what this is all about. And really also bring stuff like this to more people, not just from the ultra high net worth–but to more investors. And you can't do that without the truth, credibility, and transparency that firms like ApeVue brings. So one heck of a fat pitch episode now I got more reading to go do so I don't sound so ignorant at cocktail parties. Because this meets one of my best benchmarks, Nick. So you know, you guys talked a lot about benchmarks. I like to talk about the cocktail party benchmark. Is this investment concept or topic interesting enough to bring up at a cocktail party? So this one clearly goes to the top of that performance benchmark.
Nick Fusco 31:56
Tell us in the comments, tonight, right?
Paul Barausky 31:59
All right, well, listen. Thanks so much, everyone. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fat Pitch and we'll see you next time.
Nick Fusco 32:06
Thank you. Thanks for having me.