Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

In that there's been so much conversation here about Bain Capital, I thought it might make sense just to revisit what he firm does.

Bain Capital is a Boston-headquartered alternative asset management and financial services company that specializes in private equity, venture capital, credit and public market investments. Bain invests across a broad range of industry sectors and geographic regions. As of the beginning of 2012, the firm managed approximately $66 billion of investor capital across its various investment platforms.

The firm was founded in 1984 by partners from the consulting firm Bain & Company. Since inception it has invested in or acquired hundreds of companies including AMC Entertainment, Aspen Education Group, Brookstone, Burger King, Burlington Coat Factory, Clear Channel Communications, Domino's Pizza, DoubleClick, Dunkin' Donuts, D&M Holdings, Guitar Center, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), Sealy, The Sports Authority, Staples, Toys "R" Us, Warner Music Group and The Weather Channel.

As of the end of 2011, Bain Capital had approximately 400 professionals, most with previous experience in consulting, business operations or finance. Bain is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts with additional offices in New York City, Chicago, Palo Alto, London, Luxembourg, Munich, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo.

Bain has several distinct investment businesses under the "Bain Capital" umbrella.

• Bain Capital Private Equity does leveraged buyouts of mature companies. Their current portfolio of companies is shown on the following website.

  Bain Capital Private Equity | Portfolio

• Bain Capital Ventures is the venture capital arm of the company. "Venture capital" investments are investments in start-up companies or those companies that are immature, very early in their business cycle. The companies owned as venture capital investments are shown on the following website.

  Bain Capital Ventures | Portfolio

• Sankaty Advisors is the arm of Bain that buys and sells debt instruments. They own and trade almost $16 billion in both fixed and floating rate, secured and unsecured, short-term and long-term loans.

• Absolute Return Capital is the absolute return affiliate of Bain Capital. ARC manages assets in fixed income, equity, commodity, and currency markets to produce attractive risk-adjusted returns while maintaining low correlation to traditional and other alternative investments.

• Brookside Capital is the trading arm of Bain that manages a private fund which invests in and trades the stock of public companies worldwide.

Investors in the various funds that Bain manages include some of the largest and most sophisticated financial institutions, corpoations, a variety of college endowments funds, a large number of state and large municipality pension funds, and many private investors. Since its founding in 1984, Bain has raised and managed hundreds of billions of dollars of invested capital. Mitt Romney was a founding partner and is now the sole owner of the firm.