About this episode
Join the Investment Research team in celebrating March’s NCAA Basketball Tournament with our annual Market Madness show. Our experts put their Sweet 16 of public and private investment strategies to the test and crown a champion in this bracket-style debate.
Senior Vice President of Investment Research Andrew Korz and Research Associate Alan Flannigan provide expert analysis of their sixteen-team field of strategies across public and private equity, real estate and credit.
Transcript excerpt
[00:00:04] Andrew Korz: Welcome to FireSide, a podcast from FS Investments. I’m Andrew Korz, Director of Research here at FS, and it’s the end of March and we all know what that means. The madness has commenced in college basketball and certainly it seems to have seeped into financial markets as well during the first quarter.
Today we’re going to have a little fun. We’re going to dive into our own version of the Sweet 16, in this case, 16 asset classes vying for market supremacy. I am here with my colleague and fellow bracket-ologist Alan Flannigan. We are going to make our picks based on which parts of the investment world appear most attractive in the current environment. So, Alan. Awesome to have you, and hope you’ve enjoyed the basketball so far. And it’d be awesome if you could walk us through what the Market Madness Tournament will look like here.
[00:00:51] Alan Flannigan: Absolutely.
The bracket ground rules
[00:00:54] Alan Flannigan: In style fitting with where we are in the tournament, we also have a Sweet 16 here, as Andrew said. We outlined 16 investment strategies and we’re going to discuss their relative attractiveness today, in terms of deploying capital—but with an outlook over the next year in terms of what we think from a risk-return perspective is most compelling. And so we’ve got it broken out by regions: Southwest, East, and Midwest. We’ve got ranked seeds one through four and we’ll go along and debate the merits of each. We have an open bracket going forward from this round.
[00:01:31] Andrew Korz: And this is both public and private markets we’ve had here.
[00:01:33] Alan Flannigan: This is both public and private markets. We’ve tried to match up some compelling matches here.
