PitchBook News - Ranking 2,000+ fund families

This week we released our annual global rankings of the top-performing fund managers in private markets.

While "past performance is not a guarantee of future results" is one of the most common refrains in investment management, track records do provide helpful insight into a manager's ability to execute against their stated goals.

Spanning over 2,000 fund families managed by more than 1,500 GPs, our Manager Performance Scores provide an objective, data-driven analysis of a GP's track record.

In private markets, evaluating a GP's performance history can be tricky. Common techniques for private, closed-end funds often compare managers against peers, bucketed by vintage and strategy, and placing the GP's performance—say their fund IRR—in a quartile within the peer set.

Then comes the challenge of measuring performance across a family of funds. Since performance in closed-end vehicles, raised periodically, is not a connected line like you'd find in public markets, taking an average of the metric and/or quartile is a blunt tool used to aggregate the track record into a single metric.

However, in the accompanying hypothetical, we can see that in many instances that's not very helpful. The average IRR and quartiles between families A and B are equivalent at 16% and 2.33, respectively, but the performance histories each family has had are quite different.

 

Instead, our Performance Scores take into account the dispersion of performance achieved against each fund's respective benchmark, not just the quartile. We then aggregate a family-level score by considering how realized those individual fund IRRs are.

More mature funds with high DPI are given a higher weight in our methodology, reflecting the greater certainty baked into the interim, or final, IRR figure.

The result is a vintage-agnostic, single metric to reflect how a GP's family has performed in aggregate against its funds' respective benchmarks.

Our latest PitchBook Manager Performance Score League Tables report provides top-10 rankings of fund families across 10 global strategies, from buyout and VC to funds of funds and secondaries.

PitchBook clients can access the Manager Scoring tool in our Platform for a full list of available families and scores.

As always, we welcome any questions or feedback.

 

If you've ever been forced to change your travel plans due to a canceled train, bus, or flight, you've likely experienced the same pain as a payment moving across borders.

For example, while living in Brooklyn, I relied heavily on the L Train. It was easy—with a 10-minute walk and a 15-minute train ride, I could get from my apartment to Manhattan in a breeze.

However, this experience changed drastically when the MTA began construction on the L line, disabling my tried-and-true commute path for several weeks.

Suddenly, my simple trip became longer, harder, and costlier. Instead of one direct train, I needed to find a series of connecting trains.

When money moves across borders, these same pain points can arise.

 

A larger version and much more in our 53-page research note.