Trends Watch: December 8, 2016

EisnerAmper’s Trends Watch is a weekly entry to our Alternative Investments Intelligence blog, featuring the views and insights of executives from alternative investment firms. If you’re interested in being featured, please contact Elana Margulies Snyderman.  

This week, Elana talks to Stuart Kaye, Nili Gilbert and Ralph Coutant, the investment team at Matarin Capital Management.

What is your outlook for the alternative investment industry?

It is highly dependent on which alternative investment. Broadly speaking, we are concerned about private equity which, as old timers know, used to be called leveraged buyout funds.  They are still leveraged, and if interest rates start to go up, they get hurt by that effect more than public equities do.

What is your outlook for the economy?

Our outlook is for slightly below average growth.  Positives are the low level of interest rates and increasing housing starts; a stock market that has been rising slowly over the past year is neutral; and the slight upward trend of interest rates is a modest negative.

What keeps you up at night?

A world where people get into more fights and wars with each other instead of a world where people use their resources to help each other to improve everyone’s quality of life.  From an investment perspective, nothing really keeps us up at night since the financial meltdown in the first quarter of 2009.