An average day

A typical internship day at CalPERS AIM:

8:00 a.m. Arrive, ensure coffee delivery system, read PEHub and try to make sense of latest private equity topics

8:30 a.m. Pull data for Business Development Companies (BDCs) from the web: price/book, TTM dividend/price, beta, top ten portfolio companies by value

10:00 a.m. Break for team meeting. Investment monitors talk about what they see happening in individual deals and implications for the market, if any. Really interesting. Ongoing discussion of how to implement the new placement agent policy and the various administrative and legal challenges. Painful.

12:00 p.m. Back to BDC data. Cross-referencing portfolio companies. Not much overlap there. Interesting to think about information asymmetries in private equity and how to get visibility. No eureka.

1:00 p.m. Lunch.

2:00 p.m. Meeting with fund managers. Nice suits. Interesting business model with these guys (almost always guys)...not the bog-standard "will invest in cash flow positive companies with strong management teams in defensive and counter-cyclical industries." Who wouldn't these days? But these guys operate in health care. They discount their expected returns by 20% starting in 2012 on the assumption that some kind of health reform will pass because the cost of not doing so will be too obvious and damaging by then. I'm not convinced.

3:30 p.m. Short meeting with the Mezzanine project team. Mostly tactical - setting up calls and work planning.

4:30 p.m. Putting some finishing touches on that BDC data and revising the broader BDC paper accordingly. Prepping a paragraph on fund strategy for a four page "one-pager" investment memo for a "distress for control" fund.

5:00 p.m. COB


A good day.