Fort Capital Partners 2025 Q3 Updates

Back to Work

If you’ve been reading our quarterlies, you’ll notice a theme unfolding.

In Q1, the tone was relief – markets were finally breathing again after a long stretch of paralysis. Trade tensions and fiscal drama still dominated, but there was at least a sense that uncertainty was survivable.

By Q2, we began to see opportunity in that resilience. Canada – long the cautious cousin in global markets – started to look investable once more, helped by policy reforms, a softer dollar, and the quiet steadiness that often follows volatility.

Now, as we head into Q4, the story takes another turn. Q3 brought something quieter but more meaningful, an important trend that is taking shape: people are getting back to work.

That may sound mundane, but in capital markets it’s profound. For nearly two years, “wait and see” was the default posture – for buyers, sellers, lenders, and allocators alike. But the new reality is that waiting doesn’t reduce uncertainty; it merely delays progress.

Somewhere between fatigue and practicality, a collective decision seems to have formed: if the new normal is uncertainty, we might as well operate within it.

The result is an undercurrent of activity – smaller and larger deals getting done, private investors re-engaging, and entrepreneurs once again testing the waters for growth capital or liquidity. It’s not exuberance; it’s endurance.

Is all that glitters gold?

Perhaps that’s why gold has re-entered the conversation.

But the renewed fascination with gold isn’t about apocalypse; it’s about agency. A recognition that prudence can coexist with optimism – that participating in the world sometimes means carrying insurance against it.

The new gold rush

If gold once symbolized prudence, AI has come to symbolize promise. Few doubt its transformative potential – it is already reshaping industries and redefining productivity. But conviction has a way of outpacing evidence. In today’s AI gold rush, many companies are being valued as if success were both certain and universal.

The purveyors of “picks and shovels” – from chipmakers to data-infrastructure firms – trade at valuations that imply durable, proprietary advantage. In private markets, AI-adjacent businesses are often priced for scale and profitability long before either is visible. Even among the largest players, current enthusiasm at times takes the form of complex related-party transactions that the market interprets as validation: I’ll invest tens of billions in you to justify your valuation, if you spend those tens of billions back on my product.  Not a Ponzi scheme – but complicated.

We share the belief that AI will be profoundly disruptive; we simply question whether every participant deserves to be priced as a winner. History suggests that the technologies that change everything rarely reward everyone. Anyone remember the dot-com bubble?

A renewed constructiveness

We see a parallel in our own business. The clients and investors we speak with are no longer “frozen” – they’re recalibrating. They’ve accepted that uncertainty is permanent, and in doing so they’ve found permission to move forward again.

We have seen stronger, more broad-based interest in businesses that we represent for sale.  Where we’re raising capital for growing companies, investors are once again rolling up sleeves and looking for opportunity – not solely looking for reasons to justify skepticism.

There’s a constructive balance of these instincts, one that leads to a meeting of minds where transactions get done. Our pipeline reflects this environment, and we feel increasingly positive about our clients’ prospects for completion.

In summary, if Q1 was about liberation, and Q2 was about investability, then Q3 has been about renewed constructiveness – momentum tempered by maturity.

The world hasn’t become clearer, but it has become more active. And for those of us who make our living connecting capital, that’s reason enough to be encouraged.