What we’re reading (8/13)
“What Does Palantir Actually Do?” (Wired). “Palantir is often called a data broker, a data miner, or a giant database of personal information. In reality, it’s none of these—but even former employees struggle to explain it.”
“How One Big Private-Equity Fund Makes Its Numbers Incomprehensible” (Wall Street Journal). “Partners Group Private Equity (Master Fund), which last reported almost $16 billion of net assets…is the largest SEC-registered private-equity fund, according to Interval Fund Tracker. Individuals investing in the fund must meet certain minimum financial criteria. To exit from the fund, investors submit redemption requests during designated tender periods. The schedule of investments in the fund’s latest annual report listed 1,089 individual private-equity investments in a table that included the fair value and acquisition date for each. In a footnote to that table, however, it listed 1,095 different cost figures. That is six more cost figures than there were investments. The footnote spanned three pages, single-spaced. In other words, there is no way someone reading the annual report could determine which cost figure applied to which investment—and no way to gauge which investments might have fishy markups.”
“Private Equity Is Knocking on the Door of Americans’ Retirement Funds. Don’t Let It In.” (Barron’s). “Employers are allowed to auto-enroll eligible employees into 401(k) plans. Though employees can opt out of enrollment or choose their own investments, in practice, nearly everyone who is auto-enrolled puts their savings into target date funds. Were those funds to include private equity, millions of workers’ savings would be channeled into one of Wall Street’s most opaque and expensive products. Plan committees would be shielded from fiduciary liability so long as they follow Department of Labor rules for which default funds they use. Savers would effectively be conscripted into alternative investments. If private equity truly offered compelling value for retirement savers, it wouldn’t require regulatory capture and behavioral inertia to access their capital. Genuine investment opportunities sell themselves to informed buyers over time, not through default settings and liability shields.”
“Allocators Are Betting on Active — But The Numbers May Be Against Them” (Institutional Investor). “Despite more allocators depending on active management to generate returns amid volatility, the numbers continue to show that the vast majority of actively managed funds fail to beat their benchmarks. New research from Morningstar shows that only 33 percent of actively managed mutual funds and ETFs survived and outperformed their passive peers over the year ending June 2025 — a 14 percentage-point drop from the previous year.”
“Can Lower(ed) Expert Opinions Lead To Better Consumer Ratings?: The Case Of Michelin Stars” (Xingyi Li, Yiting Deng, and Puneet Manchanda, and Bert de Reyck). “Expert opinion exerts tremendous influence on the purchase journey, but its effect on overall consumer experience is ambiguous because it can give rise to both “expectation” and “reputation” effects. This paper explores the effect of expert opinions on consumer experience via the lens of consumer reviews in the restaurant industry, where the expert opinions are conveyed by Michelin stars. The paper uses a unique data set based on the Michelin Guide for Great Britain & Ireland from 2010 to 2020. The data include consumer reviews on TripAdvisor for all restaurants that were awarded Michelin stars during this period and a large pool of potential control restaurants…We find…that a loss in Michelin stars leads consumers to become less focused on value and become less demanding regarding service.”
