Apollo in the Media
December 18, 2024
Stephanie Drescher on Bloomberg TV
The interview originally aired on Bloomberg TV on December 5, 2024
“Ultimately we do believe that there is a convergence occurring in terms of public market exposure and private, and that private plays a role as a replacement for a portion of both fixed income and equity allocation.”
Apollo Partner and Chief Client and Product Development Officer Stephanie Drescher joined Bloomberg’s Open Interest for a conversation about the need to rethink investment portfolio construction and the role of private markets exposure for individual investors looking to generate wealth and save for retirement.
Stephanie highlighted how private markets have the potential to deliver excess return per unit of risk while diversifying portfolios and offering access to a broader investible universe with less volatility.
For decades, conventional wisdom has held that private markets are too illiquid, risky and inflexible for defined contribution (DC) retirement plans. But many of these objections no longer hold water especially those focused on liquidity. Thanks to recent innovations in structure, strategy and oversight, the tools to manage liquidity within DC plans have evolved dramatically.
America is facing a widely recognized retirement crisis. Although retirement solutions providers have made important—and consistent—strides towards mitigating risks for retirees (from portfolio diversification to investment biases to longevity risk), key concerns remain.
As the US retirement landscape continues to evolve, the ongoing shift from defined benefit (DB) pensions to defined contribution (DC) plans continues to expose the critical gap in both retirement savings and strategy. The traditional portfolios powering today’s DC plans—typically centered around publicly traded equities and bonds—are showing signs of strain, especially in a world defined by heightened market volatility, concentration, compressed returns and growing longevity risk.
