Kingdom Holdings: The New Berkshire Hathaway?

Fancy investing in an extremely successful hedge fund without paying 2-and-20? Kingdom Holdings might be your best bet yet. The investment vehicle of Saudi Arabian billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, is planning to raise $840 million in an IPO on the Saudi stock exchange, Bloomberg is reporting today. The stake would value Alwaleed's company at $16.8 billion, which sounds like a lot of money until you realise that its assets total $24.7 billion, and that it's had a truly magnificent run so far:

Kingdom's average return on investments over the last 16 years is 20 percent, the closely held company said. Kingdom has outperformed the MSCI and Standard & Poor's global indexes by more than 10 percent in that period, it said.

Kingdom could be the next Berkshire Hathaway (maybe it already is the next Berkshire Hathaway), and I suspect that its shares will trade up sharply in the secondary market. Although exactly when that's going to be remains very unclear. It'll also be very interesting to see if Alwaleed will pursue a dual listing in either New York or London – or, indeed, if he'll sell a stake privately to the Chinese central bank...