Apollo often becomes the largest investor in its own funds, using its retirement services arm and balance sheet. This aligns interests by ensuring the firm experiences the same financial outcomes as its clients, which builds significant trust and demonstrates high conviction.

Traditional valuation metrics ignore the most critical drivers of success: leadership, brand, and culture. These unquantifiable assets are not on the balance sheet, causing the best companies to appear perpetually overvalued to conventional analysts. This perceived mispricing creates the investment opportunity.

Private equity managers often get psychologically anchored to their purchase price. Instead of cutting losses on a poorly performing asset to redeploy time and capital, they hold on in the vain hope of getting their money back, turning a bad deal into a time-consuming, mediocre one.

The common bias of loss aversion doesn't affect investors who have done exhaustive upfront work. Their conviction is based on a clear understanding of an asset's intrinsic value, allowing them to view price drops as opportunities rather than signals of a flawed decision.

The best investment deals are not deeply discounted, low-quality items like "unsellable teal crocodile loafers." Instead, they are the rare, high-quality assets that seldom come on sale. For investors, the key is to have the conviction and preparedness to act decisively when these infrequent opportunities appear.

Marks' early career experience losing 95% on 'great' Nifty Fifty stocks taught him a core lesson: no asset is so good it can't be overpriced, and few are so bad they can't be a good investment if cheap enough. This principle of 'buying things well' became his foundation.

Sectors that have experienced severe distress, like Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS), often present compelling opportunities. The crisis forces tighter lending standards and realistic asset repricing. This creates a safer investment environment for new capital, precisely because other investors remain fearful and avoid the sector.

Jeff Aronson reframes "distressed-for-control" as a private equity strategy, not a credit one. While a traditional LBO uses leverage to acquire a company, a distressed-for-control transaction achieves the same end—ownership—by deleveraging the company through a debt-to-equity conversion. The mechanism differs, but the outcome is identical.

For private market giants, the key differentiator isn't assets under management, but the ability to create proprietary investment opportunities. Apollo has built 16 internal "origination engines" in niche areas like fleet and consumer finance to generate unique alpha for its clients.