September 30, 2025
Family Office Insider
As we enter the last quarter of 2025, one thing is undeniable: this has been a year of extremes. Public equities sold off sharply in the first half, only to rebound over the summer. Yet conditions today look much the same as they did before April’s tariff-driven volatility: Public markets remain concentrated, expensive, and heavily tied to artificial intelligence. To put this in perspective, the entire upward revision to 2026 S&P 500 earnings has come from just seven companies — the Magnificent 7. For the other 493, expectations remain subdued.
Purchase Price Matters
For family offices, allocating broadly to “alternatives” is no longer the effective diversifier it once was. The same concentration risk seen in public markets is now spilling into some areas of the private market. For example, 63% of all North American venture deals are tied to AI or machine learning.
At the same time, as Apollo Global Management’s President Jim Zelter recently noted in Bloomberg, the inputs that once fueled private equity returns have reversed. Despite the Fed’s cut, rates remain elevated, debt is more expensive, valuations are pressured, and exits are slowing. Rumors of the “death of private equity” are exaggerated, but consolidation is clearly underway.
These challenges reinforce a central pillar of our investment philosophy: purchase price matters. Data from PitchBook shows portfolio companies bought at higher multiples have taken far longer to exit than those acquired at lower ones — a dynamic growing more pronounced in recent vintages.
In what is proving to be a challenging environment for most private equity mangers, we expect Apollo to build off the strength of previous fund vintages and stay on offense while much of the industry remains on defense. With differentiated sourcing, proprietary deal flow, and value creation levers beyond multiple expansion, our focus remains on alpha at entry, in the build, and at exit.
Apollo is constantly seeking new ways to deploy capital and deliver innovative solutions for family offices. Apollo’s short-term, drawdown dislocated credit strategy offers investors dedicated access to top of the capital structure credits during periods of market stress. Consistent with the strategy since its inception, the strategy seeks to capitalize on liquidity-driven credit opportunities, scaling deployment to opportunistically purchase first-dollar risk assets that trade down due to technical, non-economic reasons during short-term and often unpredictable bouts of spread widening. We believe the current environment is prime for a dislocation strategy – while spreads have roundtripped and are back at their tights, we continue to observe heightened fragility across the market.
The common thread is balance: exposure to growth while avoiding overconcentration, and access to return streams less correlated with public markets.
If you’d like to learn more please reach out to the team.
Sincerely,
The Apollo Global Family Office Team
Thoughts from Our Leaders
Apollo Answers: 10 Questions for Private Credit.
Alex Wright, Partner and Global Wealth Strategist at Apollo, explores 10 key questions to ask private credit managers in our latest episode of “Apollo Answers.”
Asset-Backed Finance is Having a Moment
In 2025’s turbulent market environment, one corner of private credit is enjoying its moment in the sun: asset-backed finance. In this episode of The View from Apollo, Bret Leas, Apollo’s Co-Head of Asset-Backed Finance, explains how this estimated $20 trillion global market works.
In the News
CEO Marc Rowan on CNBC’s Inside Alts
Marc Rowan sat down with CNBC's Robert Frank to discuss why traditional investing is broken, the firm's growth, the multi-trillion dollar opportunity in private credit and what it means that more Americans will have access to private markets.
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