Perspectives from Mavros.
Analysis and thoughts on family wealth, markets, building enduring enterprises and the global economy from across Mavros.
Interval Funds: Private Markets in a Public Wrapper, and the Fine Print
A new class of fund is bringing private assets to ordinary investors with low minimums and simple tax reporting. The access is real. So are the trade-offs the marketing tends to skip.
Read postHow Concentrated the S&P 500 Has Become
The top ten names now sit near 40 percent of the S&P 500, well past the dot-com peak, and statistically the index behaves like a portfolio of roughly 55 to 60 equally weighted stocks, not 500. History has a clear pattern for how these episodes end.
Read postContinuation Funds and GP-Led Secondaries
The fastest-growing corner of private markets is a fund selling an asset to itself. Continuation vehicles solve a real problem and create a real conflict, and the limited partner is handed a choice most are unprepared to make.
Read postDPI vs. IRR: How to Actually Judge a Private Fund
The internal rate of return is the number every private fund leads with, and the one it can shape most easily. Learn to read the measures a manager would rather skip past, and you can tell real performance from a flattering chart.
Read postRollover Equity and the Second Bite
When a private equity firm buys your company, they ask you to keep a stake and roll it into the new entity. That rolled stake can end up worth more than the cash you took at closing. It can also come to almost nothing, and the difference hides in terms most sellers never read.
Read postSelling Your Business Without Overpaying the Tax
The price you negotiate is a gross number. What you keep hangs on decisions made long before the sale: your entity, the shape of the deal, and where the proceeds land. Most owners leave a fortune on the table and never know it.
Read postPrivate Equity: Our Perspective
Private equity is now a standing line in almost every serious portfolio. Our view on what the evidence actually shows, where the returns come from, what it costs, and why access to the right managers is the whole game.
Read postGRAT vs. Sale to an IDGT: Choosing the Right Freeze
Two structures push future appreciation down to your heirs at little or no gift-tax cost. They look almost alike on paper and behave nothing alike in practice. Pick the wrong one and you can waste the whole opportunity, or aim it at the wrong generation.
Read postQualified Small Business Stock: The Exclusion, and the Traps That Void It
Section 1202 can wipe out federal tax on millions of dollars of gain. It's also stuffed with conditions that quietly knock out the people who assumed they qualified. Here's what earns the exclusion, and what forfeits it without a word.
Read postA&D and GovCon M&A: The Diligence That Is Regulatory, Not Financial
A defense or government-contracting deal looks like ordinary M&A. It isn't. A hidden layer of rules can quietly gut the price after you've signed, and the diligence that actually matters has almost nothing to do with the financials.
Read postOffshore, Onshore
Offshore stopped being about taxes the day the world agreed to share account information. For an American, the tax bill is the same wherever the money sits. The real reasons to cross a border are narrower than the myth, and they often point back home.
Read postEuropean Football as an Asset Class
Owning a European football club is a very different proposition from owning a U.S. sports franchise, and mostly a riskier one. A single bad season can erase a large part of what you paid, which is why serious capital has stopped buying one club and started building portfolios of them.
Read postBuying Into a Team
The leagues finally let private equity in. A minority stake in a team, though, comes with about the worst terms you'll ever sign in a private deal, and the real value hides somewhere most buyers never think to look.
Read postWhite paperPrivate Equity: Where the Return Actually Comes From
Private equity is now the largest private asset class, and one of the least understood. What follows is what it actually is, how a fund really works, where the returns come from, what it costs, and how to tell a real edge from a well-told story.
Read postQuality of Earnings: What a Buyer Actually Checks
Before a buyer pays your multiple, they test whether your profit is actually real. Quality of earnings is that test, and understanding it before you sign the letter of intent is worth more than any clever tactic you'll use after.
Read postPre-IPO Liquidity: Selling Before the Bell
Companies now stay private about twice as long as they did a generation ago, which leaves founders and early employees rich on paper and short on cash. There are honest ways to take a measured amount off the table before the IPO. And good reasons to.
Read postWhite paperThe Estate Freeze: Moving the Upside Before the Event
The cheapest time to give away a company is before it's worth anything. A freeze locks in your value today and sends tomorrow's growth to your children. It only works if you do it before there's a price on the table.
Read postWhite paperThe Three Lenses of Due Diligence
Underwriting a private investment means answering three separate questions, and each one needs its own rigor. Is the deal good? Is the manager good? Will the operation hold? Most diligence that fails does the work well. It just does the work on the wrong question.
Read postWhite paperGoing Public: A Founder's Guide to the IPO
An IPO is a financing. It is also the largest personal liquidity event of a founder's life, and both are happening at once. Almost all the planning goes to the financing. Almost none goes to the money the founder keeps. This is the whole arc, from the decision to the morning after the bell.
Read postMavros Launches MOSAIQ, Its Proprietary Private-Markets Intelligence Platform
An in-house intelligence engine, built by Mavros and reserved for Mavros alone, that sharpens how the firm sources, prices, and executes across private markets.
Read postIPO Readiness: 18 Months to a Listing, and the Years Before That Decide It
IPO readiness isn't a finance-team checklist you start a year out. The moves that decide your after-tax outcome, and your control, happen two to three years before that, and most founders miss the window.
Read postDirect or Through Funds: How Family Offices Actually Invest
Family offices get built by people who once ran a business, so the pull to invest directly in companies runs deep. The data says most of them do both, and the reason is worth understanding before you copy either one.
Read postThe Secondaries Market in 2025: From Backdoor to Mainstream
The market for used private-equity stakes was once where underperforming assets went to be quietly sold off. It's become one of the most reliable ways to build a private portfolio, often at a discount, and it's worth understanding why.
Read postThe Shrinking Public Market
The number of American public companies has halved since the 1990s. The market you can actually buy is now a small, late, picked-over slice of the economy, and your index fund misses the part that grows.
Read postFrom 60/40 to 50/30/20: The Case for Private Markets in a Portfolio
The 60/40 portfolio worked for forty years because bonds hedged stocks. Then inflation came back and the hedge broke. The response taking shape is a third sleeve of private assets, and it's worth weighing honestly.
Read postBuilding a Private Allocation
The hard part of private markets is rarely picking funds. It is the portfolio-construction traps no one warns you about, the ones that forced endowments to sell at the bottom.
Read postThe Dynasty Trust Playbook
Most estate planning asks who gets what when you die. The families who compound wealth across generations ask a sharper question, and they answer it with a structure most people have never used.
Read postWhite paperThe Great Transition
The largest transfer of business ownership in history is underway as the boomer generation retires. On paper it looks like a seller's market. For most owners it will be the opposite, and the reason is preparation, not the economy.
Read postThe Stay-Private Era
The most valuable companies in the world now stay private for a decade or more, growing large enough to rival the public giants. Why the exit narrowed, what a private valuation is really worth, and how the founders and families whose wealth sits locked inside these companies can turn it into cash, protect it, and hand it down.
Read postStructure Your Estate Before You Sell Your Business
Selling your company is probably the biggest financial event of your life. The work that decides how much your family keeps gets done before the sale ever closes.
Read postThe Zeroed-Out GRAT: Passing the Upside to Your Heirs at Almost No Tax Cost
A grantor retained annuity trust lets you move an asset's future growth to the next generation while spending little or none of your lifetime exemption. Here's how the zeroed-out version actually works, and when it earns its keep.
Read postSell-Side vs. Buy-Side in the Lower Middle Market
In the lower middle market, private equity now drives most deals. Your most likely buyer is a sponsor solving for a return rather than a strategic paying for fit, and that changes everything about how you should sell.
Read postThe Economics of a Franchise
Teams make their money from media rights and scarcity, not from tickets or winning, and the most valuable thing about owning one may be the tax code.
Read postConcentration in the Index Era
You bought the index for diversification. What you own is a concentrated bet on a handful of stocks and a single factor, and the flows that inflated it can reverse together.
Read postThe Case for an Integrated Merchant Bank
Why founders and families tend to do better with one relationship that runs across advice and capital, instead of a roster of specialists who each see only their own corner.
Read postWhite paperThe J-Curve, and How to Beat It
Everyone knows private funds lose before they earn. Fewer know the curve bends to how you enter rather than any law of nature, and that much of the premium you’re promised is an accounting illusion.
Read postReading Your Term Sheet Like a Banker
Founders read the valuation. Bankers read the waterfall, the order the money comes out in when the company sells. The headline number tells you less about your actual take-home than almost anything else on the page.
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Occasional research and points of view on private markets, family office, and the decisions that define a company. No noise.