Dry powder

Dry powder — capital held ready but undeployed: cash, or committed-but-uncalled fund capital. It looks like drag in good years and becomes the entire strategy in bad ones — Blackstone’s ~$100M/week foreclosure buying in 2012–13 required having the powder when nobody else did. Pattern #7’s precondition: solvency plus liquidity when others have neither. Tiger 21’s 9% cash line is dry powder plus sleep insurance, sized in months of burn.

First used in: 5.2 · The ten breakthrough patterns