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This week, private equity firm Fortress Investment Group (NYSE: FIG) reported its Q2 earnings. Well, as should be no surprise, compensation costs were higher (not cheap to hire investment gurus). In fact, there was a net loss of $55.1 million. Although, the firm thinks a better metric is "pretax distributable earnings," which came to $143 million in Q2.
What's more, revenues fell from $328.3 million to $268.1 million. No doubt, the private equity game can be volatile.
On the conference call, Fortress CEO Wesley Edens had some interesting things to say about the turmoil in the financial system.
He said that it's going to take some time to clear out the huge amounts of debt that have yet to be placed for buyouts. Much of the debt is on balance sheets of firms like JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM), Lehman Brothers Holdings (NYSE: LEH), and Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS).
So, it's a good bet we'll see little buyout activity in the near term.
Interestingly enough, Edens sees this as an opportunity. After all, his firm is highly focused on value plays and has lots of experience with distressed assets. Also, Fortress has a billion in capital to put to work.
While this is good, the fact is that it will take time to get results on these types of strategies. And that can be a problem for jittery investors.
Keep in mind that -- over the past two days -- the stock is down about 12%.
Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.
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