In a fireside chat at FIS Harvard, Blue Owl co-founder Doug Ostrover said the fast-growing alternatives shop won’t expand “just for the sake of hubris” as it pursues market leadership through a tightly defined set of offerings. He also unpacked the recent redemption pressure the firm was under and how it plans to move past it.
When Blue Owl Capital came under sustained media pressure over redemptions to its private credit funds, Michael Hitchcock, chief executive of the South Carolina Retirement System Investment Commission (RSIC), didn’t waver. He thinks that what allocators learn from their managers in a period of crisis tells them more than any official due diligence could.
Allocators are interrogating their private markets investments more rigorously as institutional investors question whether unlisted asset classes are entering an era of “true alpha” where managers skills are put to test. This trend is especially salient in private equity, and at FIS Singapore, asset owners and managers weighed the thesis around the asset class.
The surging interest in generative AI has triggered a technological arms race, driving demand for data centres. Investors are looking to capitalise on what is often described as a generational opportunity, but as Blue Owl’s James Clarke cautions, there are several important factors to assess in partners for the long-term.
Private asset managers can expect to work harder for LP capital as allocators increasingly look for more bespoke, flexible structures that meet their changing needs around liquidity, fee and types of exposures. Investors at FIS Oxford unpack how they approach manager relationships in the new era of private investments.
With digital infrastructure projects like hyperscale data centre facilities becoming bigger, more complex and more costly, Blue Owl’s Robert Hartog believes that investors should begin to take part in what he describes as a “generational market opportunity.”
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FIS 2026 at Harvard University