The performance of European private equity

As the private equity industry has matured, it has become clear to fund managers and investors alike that traditional measures for comparing private equity investments with listed equities are perfectible.

Long-term investors need to know how their investments are performing, in both absolute and relative terms. They need to be able to make comparisons that work across asset classes in order to construct balanced strategies. This presents a challenging array of issues to arrive at measurements that are accurate, consistent, and transparent.

At the same time, it is also obvious that performance has become a highly charged and high-profile topic. Selective measurements can present European private equity returns relative to public markets out of context. In doing so, they lack transparency and accuracy because they do not compare like with like.

Invest Europe actively supports the drive to more consistent and robust metrics that can enable investors to compare assets more easily. Our research on measuring private equity performance adds real understanding to the body of work on benchmarking private equity assets against public markets.