BloggingBuyouts: Enter the private markets

We at BloggingStocks pride ourselves on our laser-focus on America's most popular publicly-traded stocks. Yet something has been nagging at us: The private markets are becoming more and more important, vital even, to the performance of the public markets.

Yet... private equity really doesn't "fit" in a blog about stocks. Once a company is private, it's removed from the landscape of stuff we can know really, really well. Sure, we shop at Trader Joe's (owned by German private company Aldi Group); we drink the sauvignon blanc from E&J Gallo Winery. But we don't know much about these private companies. No matter how much money we put in their cash registers, we'll never know how profitable they are or how much is going into the CEO's pocket.

So what if we had more insights into this world of finance that, by some estimates, represents a whopping $2 trillion of capital; that overlaps so often as private equity firms take companies off the market for billions and then, sometimes, sends them back out for monetization? What if we could examine the uber-powerful world of private equity more carefully? After all, though we don't know much about the firms' inner workings, or the companies they buy and sell while they're off the market, the private finance industry impacts the public markets greatly, in every way.

That's why we launched BloggingBuyouts, a blog that investigates the private equity firms and the big deals that move markets despite their shadows and secrecy. As a signal of how important is this intersection between private finance and public markets, today at the market's close Blackstone Group, LP, one of the biggest and most fearsome of the private equity juggernauts, filed for an IPO to raise up to $4 billion.