ONE QUESTION: Litan Yahav
What do millions of data points across thousands of private portfolios reveal about how LPs and GPs actually behave?
This is One Question - where I set the stage and let my guest take it from there.
Introduction
I am honored and excited to welcome Litan Yahav. I first “met” Litan when listening to a Passive Pockets deal review and I quickly came to love his frank and meaningful questions and analysis. No softballs, no malice, just straight questions with objective and thoughtful analytical conclusions.
Since then, I was able to meet Litan in person and engage with his investment tracking platform, Vyzer, which he has diligently grown, expanded, and improved to serve the needs of accredited investors with complex portfolios - the middle ground between having more assets than a 401(k) yet too little for a family office.
Vyzer’s products include:
Vyzer online wealth management, tracking, and analytics.
Vyzer IC AI-powered deal scoring system based on a proprietary screening model.
Vyzer GP Check that pulls from actual investor data.
Litan continues to provide thought-provoking and refreshingly unvarnished content on Vyzer Weekly and LinkedIn.
I encourage you to connect with Litan on LinkedIn, tune-in to Vyzer Weekly, and check out Vyzer, Vyzer IC, and Vyzer GP Check.
My One Question to Litan
“What do millions of data points across thousands of private portfolios reveal about how LPs and GPs actually behave?”
Vyzer’s data spans millions of transactions across all types of investments that are being tracked in real time for thousands of investors. Vyzer’s database provides insights you literally cannot get anywhere else.
Here’s Litan’s answer to my one question…
LPs Do as They Do, Not as They Say
Almost every industry report you read is built on a survey. Someone asked a few hundred allocators what they plan to do next year, and the answers got turned into charts. The problem is that what investors say and what they do are two different things.
Nobody answers a survey with “honestly, I’m scared and sitting in cash.”
We see something different. Investors use Vyzer to track everything they own in one place: their syndications, funds, operating businesses, brokerage accounts, the capital calls and distributions flowing through all of it. In aggregate, fully anonymized, that becomes a picture of actual behavior. Around 2,750 investors, 29,000 transactions, roughly $30 billion in tracked assets. Not what LPs tell a surveyor. Where the wires actually went.
Here’s What Surprised Us
1. The most committed private-markets investors on earth are quietly rotating to public equities.
Remember who’s in this dataset. These are people who went looking for a platform to manage their private investments (and are using Vyzer to do it). K-1s, capital calls, sponsor portals. If anyone should be all-in on privates, it’s them.
In early 2025, 48% of their newly invested dollars went to public equities. By Q1 2026 it was 69%. Private equity’s share of new money dropped from 37% to 17% over the same stretch. At the portfolio level, private allocations went from 69% to 61% in a year. They’re not abandoning private markets. Existing positions are staying put.
But the marginal dollar, the new money that reveals what someone actually believes right now, is going public.
Liquidity and performance are doing the talking. Meanwhile the conference panels are still debating how fast private markets will grow. Both things can be true. Watch the wires.
2. Private debt didn’t decline. It collapsed.
In early 2024, private debt was about 6% of net worth across these portfolios. By the end of 2025 it was 0.7%. A 90% drop in 18 months.
This one stunned me because of the timing. It happened while the industry was declaring a golden age of private credit. Record fundraises, huge headlines. And at the exact same time, individual LPs were heading for the exit as fast as the lockups allowed.
My read:
the people closest to the actual deals, the ones reading extension letters and watching redemption gates go up at funds they know, repriced the risk long before the narrative did.
3. In real estate, LPs didn’t leave. They cut their check size in half.
This is my favorite finding because a survey could never catch it. In 2025, real estate took 74% of these investors’ private equity dollars across 46% of their deals. In 2026, it’s 26% of dollars across 48% of deals.
Read that again. The deal count went up. The dollars fell off a cliff.
Same investors, same asset class, same number of commitments, much smaller checks. That’s what hedged conviction looks like. Nobody wants to sit out of real estate entirely, but nobody’s willing to concentrate either. If you asked these LPs “are you still bullish on real estate?” most would say yes and mean it. Their wire instructions tell a more honest story.
Venture, by the way, went the exact opposite direction. Deal count share fell from 39% to 26% while dollar share nearly doubled from 15% to 28%. Fewer, bigger, higher-conviction checks. LPs are spreading risk in real estate and concentrating it in venture. I don’t think either group would describe their own behavior that way. The data does.
4. The quiet winner nobody talks about: boring operating businesses.
Cash-flowing private businesses went from 10% of new private equity dollars in 2025 to 43% in 2026. HVAC companies, service businesses, small manufacturers. No panel discussions, no newsletters hyping it, just a very large rotation of real money into unglamorous companies that produce cash.
When an asset class quadruples its share of new dollars without anyone writing think pieces about it, I pay attention.
The reverse is also useful: when the think pieces peak, the money is usually already leaving. Private debt taught us that one.
5. And on the GP side: deal quality and capital traction barely correlate.
This is the finding that should keep LPs up at night. We underwrite deals that sponsors submit to us, so we see both halves: how a deal scores on fundamentals, and how fast capital actually shows up for it. You’d expect those to move together. They mostly don’t.
Operators who would score well on any honest underwriting can struggle for months to fill a raise. Mediocre deals from sponsors with a big audience close in a week. Capital follows relationships, momentum, and marketing reach far more than it follows fundamentals.
The practical takeaway: “this deal is filling fast” tells you exactly nothing about quality. It might be the single most common piece of social proof in private markets, and in our data it carries no signal.
If anything, treat urgency as a prompt to slow down.
So what do I do with all of this as an investor myself?
Honestly, one thing changed more than any other.
I stopped putting weight on what investors say at dinners, on panels, and in surveys, including what I’d say myself on a good day. Stated intentions are marketing, even when they’re sincere.
Behavior is the data.
And for the first time we can actually see it.
My Thoughts
Litan’s commitment to providing LPs with objective, data-driven information is a rare gem. As LPs, we should note:
Funds are tied up in private deals and the majority of available cash is moving to public markets. Perhaps the realities of private and public equities is coming to light and investors are voting with their dollars. Private investments may not have the daily volatility of public equities, but the trade-off is the possibility of catastrophic loss and indefinite illiquidity.
The old adage of “if you’re reading about an opportunity in the news, it’s too late” still holds true. The wave is likely near its peak by the time an idea becomes mainstream.
LPs burned by equity positions are now being tempted by private debt - the exact opposite of where the savvy money is heading (see previous point). Moving your position in the capital stack of the same investment that lost your equity may not be the best move: boring, cash-flowing businesses could be an overlooked and superior alternative to private debt.
Excellent marketing may fill a deal, but don’t confuse demand with quality.
Thank you
Thank you to Litan for answering my one question and pulling back the curtain on what investors are actually doing - not what they say they are doing.
I encourage you to engage with Litan on LinkedIn, tune-in to Vyzer Weekly, and check out Vyzer, Vyzer IC, and Vyzer GP Check.
Very interesting trends. And I'm sure the cash will move from public to private again at some point.