Cloudflare: Another AI-Disrupted Stock You Might Want to Buy<\/a><\/p>\nLooking ahead, he said the firm entered 2026 with a pipeline larger than it had at the start of 2025, despite completing significant fundraising during 2025. He characterized the pipeline as diversified across strategies\u2014private equity, infrastructure, real estate, private credit, and hedge funds\/absolute return\u2014and diversified across client types and geographies. While acknowledging the potential for quarterly \u201clumpiness\u201d given the size of certain separate-account wins, Sacks said demand for alternatives had not disappeared during the 2022\u20132023 slowdown; rather, sales cycles stretched as rates rose and clients assessed portfolios.<\/p>\n
He added that the firm reiterated its longer-term targets on the earnings call, including goals tied to fee-related earnings growth from 2023 and adjusted net income by the end of 2028, and said management felt it was \u201con track.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sacks said the firm\u2019s individual investor\/wealth channel business represents about 5% of its capital today, but he described the opportunity as large given what he sees as under-allocation to alternatives and less diversification among wealth-channel investors compared with institutions.<\/p>\n
He pointed to several recent initiatives:<\/p>\n
A distribution joint venture with Grove Lane, which he said has already added relationships and is being staffed up<\/p>\n
An infrastructure interval fund distributed with CION, which he said is raising capital daily and is expected to grow to a size that could support entry into wirehouse platforms<\/p>\n
A filed registration for a private equity wealth-channel product<\/p>\n
\u201cWhite label\u201d or \u201cprivate label\u201d relationships, which he said numbered 11 over the last two years, enabling customized-style offerings for RIAs and advisor groups<\/p>\n
Potential future roles as a sub-advisor within model portfolios<\/p>\n
Asked about turbulence in parts of the wealth channel\u2014such as elevated redemptions and slowing gross inflows in some private credit funds\u2014Sacks said that given the firm\u2019s low starting base, the channel is \u201call upside\u201d for GCM Grosvenor. He acknowledged product preferences can shift among structures (such as tender funds versus interval funds), but said he sees a multi-year \u201ctailwind\u201d for wealth adoption of alternatives and does not foresee it turning into a headwind.<\/p>\n
On software, Sacks stressed diversification as a \u201ccore tenet\u201d across the firm\u2019s verticals, saying no single industry, issuer, manager, or strategy should become an \u201cinsurmountable problem\u201d for portfolios. He pegged firm-wide exposure to SaaS businesses at about 4% of total AUM and said SaaS exposure in the credit business is about 6%.<\/p>\n
He suggested credit \u201cattachment points\u201d should provide protection within credit portfolios, while equity valuations in SaaS could be more sensitive given historical reliance on revenue-based valuation metrics. He also said the firm believes it has more net long exposure to AI and AI beneficiaries than exposure to SaaS\/software, characterizing the firm as \u201clong the disruptors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sacks added that noise around alternatives is recurring and said recent market reactions to AI-related developments have been sharp despite AI\u2019s expected arrival and impact having been widely anticipated.<\/p>\n
Sacks reiterated comments that the firm is \u201clong origination and short capital,\u201d explaining that the platform has excess capacity and can deploy more capital with limited incremental impact on margins. He said operating margins have expanded since the firm went public, noting an improvement of \u201ca couple of hundred basis points\u201d last year and stating an expectation for continued expansion through 2028.<\/p>\n
On unrealized carried interest, Sacks described it as a \u201cvery significant\u201d asset and said carry at net asset value represented roughly 20% of total enterprise value as of Dec. 31. He said carry has been depressed by a weak realization environment, and cited fourth-quarter realized carry as the main area of disappointment versus expectations. Still, he framed realization as \u201ca question of when, not if,\u201d and said management expected a good first quarter in terms of growth of that carry asset based on items already known. He also emphasized a larger pool of \u201ccarry at work\u201d\u2014AUM subject to carry in early deployment stages\u2014which he said is multiples of carry at NAV and should, over time, convert into carry at NAV.<\/p>\n
Sacks also addressed strategy growth. He called infrastructure growth \u201cquite durable,\u201d citing fundamental demand for projects such as power generation and describing the firm\u2019s diversified approach across direct, co-investments, secondaries, and primaries. On private credit, he said client discussions often center on reallocating within fixed income, which can create room for additional private credit even for investors who consider themselves fully allocated to alternatives.<\/p>\n
Finally, on absolute return strategies, Sacks said the business has grown more slowly than private markets in recent years but remains a \u201cgreat business\u201d that generates substantial fees and cash, supported by strong performance and a \u201cvery happy\u201d client base. He said the strategy delivered net inflows last year and argued it should not be valued less attractively than a high-quality traditional asset manager, even if market multiples do not always reflect that view.<\/p>\n
GCM Grosvenor is a global alternative asset management firm that specializes in customized investment solutions across a range of private markets and hedge fund strategies. The firm partners with institutional clients\u2014including pension funds, endowments, insurers and sovereign wealth funds\u2014to design and implement portfolios that span private equity, infrastructure, real estate, credit and multi\u2010strategy hedge fund products. Through its multi\u2010manager platforms and direct co\u2010investment vehicles, GCM Grosvenor provides diversified access to opportunities that can enhance returns and manage risk in client portfolios.<\/p>\n
Founded in 1971 as Grosvenor Capital Management, the firm has built a track record of sourcing, structuring and monitoring alternative investments on behalf of its clients.<\/p>\n
The article “GCM Grosvenor CEO Touts Custom Portfolios, Record $10.5B Fundraising, and 2026 Pipeline at UBS Conference<\/a>” was originally published by MarketBeat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GCM Grosvenor logo GCM Grosvenor\u2019s \u201csolutions\u201d model is built on customized separate accounts \u2014 slightly over 70% of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[129],"tags":[4663,4662,4664,4657,4659,4658,4660,536,296,295,223,4661],"class_list":{"0":"post-5533","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ubs","8":"tag-carried-interest","9":"tag-client-relationships","10":"tag-fundraising","11":"tag-gcm-grosvenor","12":"tag-hedge-funds","13":"tag-michael-sacks","14":"tag-operating-leverage","15":"tag-operating-margin","16":"tag-private-credit","17":"tag-private-equity","18":"tag-ubs","19":"tag-wealth-channel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"GCM](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/0da794db632bfa9f451268866b5de5aa.jpeg\")
GCM Grosvenor logo <\/p>\n