Foreflight sells to private equity

ArrowFlyer86 said:
Sorry, small tangent but related to my monologue a page or two ago...
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This is awesome. Take an investment that is likely highly levered to begin with...and borrow against it. What could go wrong?
 
Sam D said:
This is awesome. Take an investment that is likely highly levered to begin with...and borrow against it. What could go wrong?
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It's been a complaint for a while with PE, but particularly post 2021.

You have leverage at the investor level (partners borrowing to meet their commitments), at the fund level, at the PE company level, and within the portfolio companies themselves. The cross collateralization between different portfolio company stakes/NAV loans and continuation funds are all just the latest financial engineering to make cash available that shouldn't be available for distributions. It's a mirage to make everything look great when it isn't.

In a lot of cases it's the same bank(s) handling these loans to each of the entities. Individually they look safe, collectively less so. So given the trillion dollar values we're talking about here you HOPE bank risk management is good enough to realize the duplicate or highly correlated exposures (but '08 demonstrated that is not a given). If it's private credit they're borrowing from, then you know the loans themselves are levered as well.

The part that blows my mind is market willingness to kick the can down the road and pretend it's just a temporary road bump as trillions of dollars of logjammed exits stack up. You see the same non-sense in Office CRE.

The underlying issue is that these assets are not worth what they paid for them. Rather than marking to market (aka: admitting you definitely lost money on this) as you are 100% required to do in the liquid public market investments, they get to essentially make up a number and say "technical market conditions are not favorable. We believe the value is $X, we just need to hold it a bit longer to realize that valuation. This is a technicality and it's purely temporary". Then your investors get to see a nice smooth fund IRR chart, even if it's not tethered to reality. And they're content to keep playing that game until you run out of financial trickery err, financial engineering, to keep the illusion going.

Totally messed up IMHO. I have little doubt that something big will happen there, just a matter of when. You can't just pull trillions of dollars out of thin air to buy these assets just so that their PE owners/investors don't have to take a loss.

Reality will always eventually win.

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EDIT: This also is not my own hot-take there's credible people who have been sounding the alarm for a while on the structure.

Like Amundi CIO said back in 2022 (2.5T AUM asset manager):
Quote: "What you see is that the vast majority of deals currently are being done between private equity firms. One private equity firm will sell to another who is happy to pay a high price as they have attracted a lot of investors.
"The bulk of deals are like this."
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Vol launding (Bloomberg)
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And the problem is big (measured in trillions).
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On the VC side:
From feb25
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As of Q4 2024 (this was for a subset of companies with bigger valuations):
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Edit 5/5/25 with an update FT reference from over the weekend:
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Looks like a fancier version of the meme-coin rug-pulls that have become popular with certain scammers recently.
 
TCABM said:
With the military discount, I get 15 months of iFly for significantly less than 12 months of GP. I will admit the GP UI is more refined than iFly, but GP doesn’t offer a web-based tool for flight planning and sync w/EFB like you get with FF and iFly.
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GP just announced a web-based flight planning tool..
pilotweb.garmin.com

Garmin Pilot Web | Free Flight Planning, Dynamic Weather & More

Garmin Pilot Web delivers free flight planning, fully-featured dynamic weather, and syncs with the Garmin Pilot Mobile App with a paid subscription.
pilotweb.garmin.com pilotweb.garmin.com
 
TCABM said:
I saw that, thank you. I’m still happy with iflyEFB.
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I complained about iFly for a while, but I think I'm sticking with them now that I figured out the Bluetooth serial thing. Of the 3 discussed here, iFly has the best range of compatibility with platforms and portable devices.

Does the .mil discount apply to retired?
 
Ed Haywood said:
…Does the .mil discount apply to retired?
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Yes. At least as of earlier this year when I renewed. Once you go thru the initial process, it auto-renews annually with the discount.

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TCABM said:
Yes. At least as of earlier this year when I renewed. Once you go thru the initial process, it auto-renews annually with the discount.

ac11f1fda9e79d442fe94037faac15ca.jpg
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Well I should get in on that, then. I just paid full price for VFR renewal. Mebbe I'll try to get the mil deal for the IFR add on.
 
Ed Haywood said:
Well I should get in on that, then. I just paid full price for VFR renewal. Mebbe I'll try to get the mil deal for the IFR add on.
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The “discount” is a 15 month subscription term for the 12-month price.

If you renewed in the last month, you might see if they’ll goodwill an extension on your current plan unless you really want the IFR plates.
 
Subjective comparison - a flying buddy used Garmin pilot, I used Foreflight, so we swapped a few times. I decided Foreflight had the cleaner and more intuitive UI and stuck with it. Massive difference? I didn't think so. Foreflight may have had a bigger lead for IFR lying, perhaps. This was a decade ago.
 
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