Exit queues for funds in the NFI-ODCE have been at all-time highs for several quarters now — higher even than during the global financial crisis, by a substantial margin.

A good friend in the industry once advised me that there’s no such thing as an exit queue in an open-end fund. There’s only price. What he meant was that if the assets in the funds are properly marked to market, the exit queues vanish.

The rationale, he explained, is pretty simple. Investors in these funds are fiduciaries. They’re mandated to place the financial interests of the investors they represent before all other considerations. If you as an investor can exit a fund at a value higher than you could theoretically buy back into the market, the only prudent thing to do is to enter a redemption request.

This is true even if you don’t really want or need the money back.

Of course, there are other reasons an investor might want to enter a redemption request. Perhaps they’ve