Alternative Investing Report - September 25, 2025

*as of 9/24; Sources: S&P, BTC, FTSE, DJRE, CL50

Q2 saw the percentage of venture funds returning capital to its investors increase for funds that started between 2017 and 2023, with newer funds moving quicker to issue distributions. For funds of the 2023 vintage, 15% have already returned some capital to investors, a higher percentage than any vintage from 2017-2022. Meanwhile, net returns are trending up, and the amount of dry powder funds are holding has decreased as they start to make more investments.

➨ TAKEAWAY: The biggest issue facing the VC world the past few years has been a lack of liquidity, which has led to antsy investors and a lack of new fundraising. Funds are responding to those concerns by trying to grant their investors more liquidity, which is a good sign for the broader industry. The trend should also lead to more dealmaking, more investing, and more fundraising, rather than capital sitting stagnant.

In this episode of Smart Humans, Slava Rubin talks with Mark Klein, founder and CEO of SuRo Capital, about the evolution of IPOs, the current market landscape, and the future of private markets.

🛹 Tony Hawk memorabilia: The skateboard that the legendary skater used to land the first ever “900” - spinning around two and a half times in competition - sold for $1.15 million, nearly double expectations, and the helmet, sneakers, and kneepads from the same X Games all sold for around 10 times their pre-sale mid-estimates.

🏢 Office market: The national office vacancy rate is down 80 basis points year-over-year, with high-end offices outperforming the rest of the market, especially in top-tier markets.

🎨 New buyers: Nearly three-quarters of all buyers at the recently-concluded Independent art fair in New York were new clients of the dealers they bought from, if not necessarily new collectors. Still, the results are promising for an art market looking to attract Gen Z and Millennial buyers.

🚀 Legal tech hits new high: With the recent $400 million raise by Filevine, legal tech startups have raised $2.4 billion so far this year, already setting a new all-time high for the sector.

🪙 Tether looking for massive round: The stablecoin giant is reportedly aiming to raise between $15 billion to $20 billion at a potential valuation of $500 billion, which would make it one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

🏡 Compass acquires Anywhere: With the acquisition of its rival (which owns Coldwell Banker, Century 21, and others) for $1.6 billion, Compass will be the largest residential real estate broker in the world.

💵 Private credit-backed bonds: Major asset managers like Apollo and Blackstone are selling bonds backed by private credit loans at the fastest pace on record, even as the yield on those bonds has dropped.

👛 Rare gold coin: A 1629 100 ducat gold coin that features the Archduke of Austria Ferdinand III could fetch up to $2.5 million at auction in November.

AI has emerged as a new source of information, whether in search engine summaries or social media fact-checking, but its accuracy still needs to improve significantly to be relied upon. So-called “hallucinations” have been a feature of AI models from the beginning, but models are also deliberately lying to us and “scheming” to achieve its goals that could be separate from the user’s. OpenAI’s new research into the topic assures us that SkyNet is not imminent, but it does call into question the effectiveness of the models and any current and future AI agents who can deceive its users. One particularly alarming nugget from the paper is that AI developers can’t train models to not be deceptive because the models can use that training to become even better at being deceptive without being detected.