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John Caple Profile picture
John Caple
@BigJohn043
20+ Year Value PE Investor Focus on Industrials and Business Services
Apr 6, 2025 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
Tariffs are just a tax. But taxes are generally bad for economic growth. So how big of a deal is this and what are the likely impacts?

A thread... JP Morgan took the amount of tariffs times the new tariff rates and came up with $660B annually in new taxes or 2.2% of GDP. Image
Apr 3, 2025 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
Lots of talk about tariffs for obvious reasons today. I keep seeing people asking for the "smart" argument for tariffs. I am not sure I agree with how the administration is doing this but let me give it a try.

A thread.... First, we are getting ripped off in global trade. Our markets are open and almost everyone is charging us both tariffs and non tariff trade barriers. We aren't going to fix this by asking pretty please. We need to say we will do it as well.... Image
Mar 19, 2025 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Some good data from Prequin that they presented at Super Return North America this week. A thread.

The average fund holds a first close in 6 months at about 50% of target. This hasn't changed over time.

But total time to raise is way up. 23 months... Image Fees for private asset classes are down across the board. Some of this is driven by a shift towards larger funds that have lower fee rates.

But pressure on fees going forward is a real story for all private asset classes IMO. Image
Mar 15, 2025 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Some really interesting data from Kirkland & Ellis. Never quite seen data like this.

First slide, earnouts are up and happen in 27% of deals. Not surprised that they are up given the value expectation gaps. Surprised at 27%.

1/4 Image And the average earnout is 30% of deal size. Surprised they are so large. Really shocked by this.

2/4 Image
Dec 22, 2024 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
I read hundreds of confidential information memorandums ("CIMs") on companies for sale every year. Most are poorly done including many of the ones by the best middle market investment banks. Lets talk about it....

1/7 The first thing I do when opening a CIM is to go to the key investment highlights page. Usually there are at least 8 and often 10, 12 or more.

Here is the thing. Attention isn't an unlimited resource. If you have 12 key selling points it isn't like I am going to take the time to carefully read all 12. I will skim them. Maybe I will skip the page entirely because it is a word wall.

But all of these extra points are going to take attention away from the 2 or 3 reasons I might really get excited about this deal.

I know how this happens. You sit in a room for a drafting session and every idea for a key selling point gets written down and added to the page. I can also frequently tell when I do a call with the banker that they haven't really thought deeply about what is is critical and really attractive about this deal.

You should really limit your key selling points to 3. If you want to have 4 or even 5 I can live with that. But no more.

2/7
Sep 1, 2024 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
I am often asked for book recommendations. So I thought I would do it as a single thread. I will start with business but then move to some others.

Comment on the books below if you really like any of them....

A thread. All great businesses start with a great team. Power Score is the best book I have read on how to hire and then how to make sure your team is really engaged. Big fan. Image