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Revisiting private equity performance computation for
multi-asset investors
E. Nouvellon, H. Pirotte
Centre Emile Bernheim, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management
Université Libre de Bruxelles
May 2019
Abstract
Private equity has increasingly been used in portfolio for all types of investors as family offices or
ultra-high net worth individuals. Financial Literature proposes different ways to compute private
equity performances with results that can question the promised over-performance on public
equities. The investment process in private equity funds with the system of committed capital
and called capital can have a huge impact of the private equity performance in the whole portfolio
and in multi-assets framework. This paper proposes an empirical study that integrates the J-
curve effect on the private equity part of a portfolio and its scaling effect with the low rate
environment.
KEYWORDS: private equity performance, opportunity cost of investment, general partner, limited partner,
multi-asset investors, J-curve, capital calls, deposit rate, IRR, multiple on invested capital
JEL classification: G11
1 Introduction
The importance of the private equity industry has been increasing since 2000. Committed
amounts have been growing from USD 10bn in 1991 to USD 180bn in 2000 (Jesse Reyes,
2002). After the exceptional turmoil in public equity markets in 2008, an impressive cycle of
expansion started then for the private one. The fundraising private market compound annual
growth rate (CAGR) reaches 15.1% between 2010 and 2015 according to Prequin, one of the
most important private equity databases. The private asset’s market size is nowadays close
to USD 5.2 trillion (McKinsey, 2018).