An AltView Celebration (of sorts)

For Having Unearthed Hamilton Lane's Proxy Mischief

Feb 23, 2026

We got the call from a good friend, while driving north under a blue winter sky.

“The story has hit!”

We pulled over the AltView van and excitedly opened our FT App (go ahead, mock us. But only for the FT App bit, we get touchy when people criticize our van). We skimmed the Alphaville article about Hamilton Lane’s Private Asset Fund’s (PAF) NAV-Squeezing and proxy mischief. Our favorite bit:

Then we got back on the road and listened to the audio version, laughing out loud as the Australian-accented reader evoked an image for us: Honestly, does anyone do snark better than the FTAV?

They say it is important to celebrate success.

Today we do this.

The AltView was the key source to both Jason Zwieg’s excellent article last June as well as last week’s fine FTAV work by Robin Wigglesworth.

We celebrate, but we also feel relief. We are investor advocates, after all. It’s been hard to remain quiet.

We’ll save the story of how we found it for another day.

Unlike the hero-geniuses that increasingly invest our great society’s hard-earned wealth in stuff like Private equity secondary evergreen funds and whatnot, The AltView claims no special skill.

Dumb luck played a key role in our discovery, alongside caffeine, mild OCD, and a growing resistance to gaslighting (ok, one skill).

Some friends wondered, with such a bombshell, why not make the story your own?

A fair question, and we thought about doing just that. However, our time as an investor-advocate/industry critic has been barely a year. We are a wee team.

Savvy readers might have correctly inferred that we are not actually a team but are one individual with an imaginary staff of friends… (aside: we increasingly find ourselves with new IRL friends! Friends we really like! And for this we are grateful).

Anyway: allowing well-qualified proxies to expertly blast the proxy story out to a much bigger audience-- while avoiding getting squashed like an ant by an elephant --seemed to us like a good idea. We’ve seen what well-resourced firms can do when they catch wind of an unwelcome story like this, and it’s not fun.

A quick review

Here is a list of people that seem to think that what Hamilton Lane did with the PAF was worth some column-inches. Two of these are well-respected players. Can you guess which 😉?

1. The AltView

2. Jason Zweig-The Wall Street Journal

3. Robin Wigglesworth-Financial Times

As scrutiny grows, we’d expect others to draw similar conclusions.

The company will no doubt have a different opinion and continue to engage in pretzel-twisting and strenuously object (think Demi Moore in A Few Good Men), arguing that what they did was kosher.

This is what the democratization of alts looks like….

Speaking of opinions, PAF investors surely have them, too. Wouldn’t that be a good place to go next: ask them how they interpreted the proxy?

The PAF proxy set out that a total of 194.5 million shares were entitled to vote across the three classes:

Of the 194.5 million, nearly half didn’t vote at all. Meanwhile, 98.6 million or 50.7%, of the shares were voted, the vast majority in favor:

One shareholder we do know from the proxy: Mass Mutual, listed in the proxy as an 8% shareholder of the fund’s Class I shares:

Source: SEC

We emailed Mass Mutual in the Spring of 2025, before the WSJ article was published, to see how they voted (or whether they voted) but got no response. We’ll try again for sure, but in our experience our JV-status gets us no love from comms departments.

Mass Mutual wasn’t alone: there are other institutions that remain invested in this fund.

We’d forgive other investors if they focused on the headline fee reductions and went no further. Maybe that was the point?

If the PAF proxy statement was “clear and comprehensive” as Hamilton Lane says, we’d hate to see their version of murky. Genuinely understanding it took us a long time.

Then again, we claim no special skills. Except resistance to gaslighting.