Dislocation

What this tab establishes

KKR fell 49.8% from a $167.07 close on 31 January 2025 to $83.88 on 12 March 2026, and trades at $102.66. The fall came in four legs; the largest ran 3 February to 12 March 2026 on average volume 3.7 times normal, with a measured twenty-day spike of 3.93 times the pre-peak median. No company guidance cut preceded that leg. The repricing hit the whole listed alternative-manager group, on AI-disruption fear applied to private-market portfolios.

The Drawdown

Source: derived from the daily price record; figures as published in the run's deterministic feature file (fit_features.capitulation_gauge.drawdown).

Source: daily closing prices as reported; month-end observations plus the 12 March 2026 trough close.

The fall is not one event. Measured with a 12% reversal filter, four separate declines of 16% or more are separated by three rallies of 13% or more. Peak to current is 38.6%; peak to trough is the 49.8% the feature file records.

Source: derived from the daily closing-price record, 31 January 2025 to 28 July 2026, using a 12% reversal filter.

Leg 7 is the one that made the low. It divides cleanly in two. From the 11 December 2025 local high of $142.77 to $114.36 on 2 February 2026 the stock lost 19.9% across 34 sessions on average daily volume of 4.05 million shares, 1.41 times the pre-peak median — decline without an event, at ordinary turnover. From 3 February to 12 March 2026 it lost a further 26.7% across 27 sessions on average daily volume of 10.64 million shares, 3.72 times the pre-peak median.

The Trigger

Three dated documents bear on the fall, and they do not carry equal weight.

The first is company-specific and small. On 7 November 2025, on the third-quarter call, KKR disclosed that roughly $350 million of gross carried interest collected from its second Asia private equity fund — raised twelve to thirteen years earlier, stopped investing about eight years earlier — had to be repaid, with the compensation reversal taken as a fourth-quarter charge worth about $0.18 of adjusted net income per share; management stated it saw no other material clawback risk across the portfolio [1]. The stock closed up 1.68% that day on 3.18 times median volume.

The second is the fourth-quarter print. KKR furnished its FY2025 results on 5 February 2026 [2], reporting $1.08 of fee-related earnings per share, $1.42 of total operating earnings per share and $1.12 of adjusted net income per share, the last including the carried-interest repayment obligation; excluding it, $1.30 [3]. Against consensus that was a 1.6% shortfall on normalised EPS and an 8.4% shortfall on revenue. The stock closed down 5.35% that day on 5.78 times median volume. The same morning KKR announced the $1.4 billion Arctos acquisition [4].

The third is not KKR's document at all, and it is the one that moved the price. On 3 February 2026 — two sessions before the results, with no KKR filing or release on the tape — the stock fell 9.69% on 11.5 million shares, 4.02 times the pre-peak median. Brookfield Asset Management's fourth-quarter call the following morning opened its question-and-answer session on the point: "a lot of anxiety surfaced in the market yesterday around AI-driven disruption and including within the alternative space" [5]. Carlyle's FY2025 Form 10-K puts the magnitude on the record: "The software sector in particular has sold off on 'AI disruption' fears and is down 33% year-to-date through February 24, 2026" [6]. EQT described the same quarter as "significant share price volatility and pressure on listed software companies as fears of an AI led business model disruption for this sector spread" [7].

The transmission mechanism into a private-markets manager is disclosed and quantified. Software is about 7% of KKR's AUM — roughly 15% inside private equity, 5% across credit, 2.5% inside Global Atlantic — and because private marks reference public comparables, the marks on those names fell in the first quarter of 2026 even though the underlying companies grew revenue and EBITDA at high single digits [8]. The first analyst question on the 5 February call named the fear directly, asking how KKR had "re-underwritten your private portfolios, your balance sheet, even your monetization pipeline for tariffs and AI" [9].

The event leg is therefore separable from the drift that preceded it. The 19.9% decline from 11 December 2025 to 2 February 2026 carried no company event and 1.4 times normal volume. Everything from 3 February onward carries both.

Sources: daily price and volume record; Form 8-K of 5 February 2026 [10]; SEC Form 4 filings for the 27 February purchases.

The Fear Gauge

The measured spike is 3.93 times. The feature file computes it as the highest twenty-session average volume inside the peak-to-trough leg divided by the median daily volume over the 180 calendar days before the peak: 11,243,613 shares against 2,863,900 shares. That twenty-session window ended on 3 March 2026 — it spans 3 February to 3 March, and so covers the whole event phase and none of the drift.

Source: derived from the daily volume record; base is the median daily volume over the 180 calendar days before the 31 January 2025 peak, 2,863,900 shares, the same base the feature file uses.

Two features of that profile matter. February 2026 averaged 10.8 million shares a day, 3.77 times the base, and the two heaviest sessions of the whole drawdown — 20.8 million shares on 4 February and 20.3 million on 27 February — sit inside it. March ran 2.80 times, then April fell back to 1.66 times and July to 1.14 times. Turnover normalised within weeks of the low, which is the shape of exhaustion rather than a persistent re-rating of the shareholder base.

The one heavier month in the record is June 2024 at 4.96 times, and it was a buying event: KKR entered the S&P 500 in the June 2024 rebalance [11], and 145.6 million shares traded on 21 June 2024 as index funds established positions. No comparable index-driven forced sale appears anywhere in the drawdown window.

Management's own framing of the frequency belongs on the record because it bears on how unusual this is. On the 5 February call the co-CEO stated that across sixteen or seventeen years as a public company, "this is the tenth time we've seen our stock down more than 20% in a month" [12]. A 20% monthly drawdown roughly every twenty months is a high base rate; the 49.8% peak-to-trough figure here is a larger event than that base rate describes, but the genre is not rare for this stock.

Who Was Selling

The direct evidence on seller identity is thin, and one line of it is missing outright: FINRA returned no reported short-interest position rows for KKR in this run, so short-interest level and change cannot be stated. Daily short-sale volume, borrow-pressure indicators and holder-level net-short disclosures are all empty as well. That is a real gap in this tab's evidence, not a finding of low short interest.

What the record does establish is who was on the other side, in size and on dated filings.

Source: SEC Form 4 open-market purchase filings (transaction code P), 9 February to 4 March 2026, as staged in this run's governance data.

Thirteen open-market purchases across five insiders totalled 516,097 shares for $50.9 million at an average of $98.69, every one of them inside the event phase. The lowest-priced pair came on 27 February — the 7.10-times-volume session — with each co-CEO taking 50,000 shares, Nuttall at $87.81 and Bae at $88.56, within 5% of what turned out to be the closing low.

The company bought alongside them. On the 5 May 2026 call KKR disclosed that it had "repurchased or retired $317 million of stock this year through May 1 at an average price of approximately $91", with the board authorising a further $500 million, and confirmed the personal purchases: "you would have also seen our co-CEOs and a number of our directors buying stock personally in the quarter" [13]. The two preceding years read differently: the feature file records buyback cash of $0 in FY2024 and $3.4 million in FY2025. Four months of 2026 bought back roughly a hundred times the prior two years combined. The mechanics of that programme belong to Self-Help; what it establishes here is that the marginal buyer at the low was the issuer and its own principals.

On the anchored side, employees own roughly 30% of the stock [14], and S&P 500 index funds have held since June 2024 [15]. Neither block is a discretionary seller. No index deletion, fund liquidation or disclosed forced sale appears in the window. The Schedule 13D/G filings staged in this run resolve 51 filings but no owner names, so institutional holder-base change cannot be quantified from the corpus.

One distinction is worth drawing precisely, because the two are easily conflated. The redemption pressure discussed through this period sat in KKR's products, not its stock: private BDC redemptions in the wealth channel, against which KKR disclosed that direct lending is $39 billion or 5% of AUM and its private BDC roughly $3 billion, or 0.4% [16]. Fund-level redemptions are not equity-holder liquidation, and nothing in the corpus links them.

Finally, the selling was not name-specific. Measured from the same 31 January 2025 peak to the same 12 March 2026 date, the four listed peers in this run's corpus with usable price feeds fell between 19% and 51%.

Source: derived from each company's own daily closing-price feed; peak-to-trough measured 31 January 2025 to 12 March 2026, February leg measured 2 February to 12 March 2026.

Over the 3 February to 12 March window KKR lost 26.7% while Ares lost 34.1%, Blackstone 27.7%, Carlyle 24.9% and Apollo 24.7%. The dispersion across the five names is under ten percentage points on a move of roughly a quarter — the group repriced together.

Estimates Against Price

The reported numbers did not fall. Across the eight quarters the run's revision data covers, KKR beat consensus normalised EPS in seven. The single miss was the fourth quarter of 2025 at 1.6% below consensus — the quarter carrying the pre-announced carry repayment, which management had flagged a full quarter ahead [17]. The first quarter of 2026, reported 5 May, beat by 10.3% on EPS and 11.2% on revenue.

Forward consensus did fall, and the timing is measurable because the estimate feed carries dated vintages.

Source: derived from the run's consensus estimate vintages (29 January, 29 April, 28 June and 28 July 2026) and the daily closing-price record.

FY2027 consensus EPS went $8.13 on 29 January 2026, $7.65 on 29 April, $7.40 on 28 June and $7.35 on 28 July — down 9.6% over six months. FY2028 went $9.48 to $8.60, down 9.3%, and has drifted up slightly since April. FY2027 revenue fell 3.4%. Over the identical six months the price fell 10.7%, from $114.98 to $102.66.

Measured to today, therefore, price and estimates have moved close to one-for-one — 10.7% against 9.6%. Measured to the trough they had not. The price fell 27.0% between 29 January and 12 March 2026; the next dated estimate vintage, struck on 29 April and so seven weeks after the low, had FY2027 EPS down only 5.9% from the January mark. The estimate cut standing on 12 March was therefore no larger than 5.9%, against a price cut of 27.0% — the price move outran the earnings revision by at least four and a half times through the capitulation, then the gap closed from both ends as the stock recovered 22.4% off the low and estimates continued to slide.

The decomposition against reported earnings is exact. FY2024 adjusted net income per share was $4.70 and FY2025 was $4.87, up 3.6%; fee-related earnings per share went $3.66 to $4.13, up 12.8% [18].

Source: derived — price divided by the most recently completed fiscal year's adjusted net income and fee-related earnings per adjusted share, $4.70 and $3.66 for FY2024 and $4.87 and $4.13 for FY2025, as filed [19].

At the peak the market paid 35.6 times the just-completed year's adjusted net income per share and 45.6 times fee-related earnings per share. Today it pays 21.1 times and 24.9 times. Multiplying through: earnings per share up 3.6% against a multiple down 40.7% gives 0.614, or a 38.6% price fall, matching the observed decline. On the fee-related line, up 12.8% against a multiple down 45.5% gives the same 38.6%. On forward consensus of $6.12 for FY2026, today's price is 16.8 times.

None of the peak-to-current decline is attributable to reported earnings going backwards. All of it is multiple.

The one forward number management did walk down came after the low. Having entered 2026 guiding to "$7-plus" of adjusted net income per share on a constructive monetisation environment, KKR said on 5 May 2026 that with "modestly less visibility today than what our budget would have suggested," it was "more likely that we land below that level", while noting that delayed monetisations would shift into 2027 rather than disappear [20]. The stock fell 1.29% that session on 1.92 times median volume. The guidance change followed the drawdown by eight weeks; it did not cause it.

What the Record Cannot Show

Three gaps bound what this tab can claim. Short interest — level, change, days-to-cover, borrow cost — is entirely absent from the run's data; the provider returned zero rows, so no statement about short positioning is available in either direction. The beneficial-ownership file resolves 51 Schedule 13D/G filings without owner names, so quarter-by-quarter institutional holder turnover cannot be traced. And the specific market event of 3 February 2026 is dated and corroborated by three separate peer filings as an AI-disruption repricing, but no primary document in this corpus names the announcement that started it; the mechanism is established, the proximate headline is not.

What the price fall means for value is not settled here. The near-term earnings and cash arithmetic against the change in market capitalisation, and the temporary-versus-permanent question, are worked in Damage Math; the yield the current price implies is computed in Yield.