Private Equity Not Worth The Risk

Last week, I wrote in-depth about some of the problems with hedge funds, especially in terms of how they’re viewed and how they affect financial markets as a whole. I thought I’d begin this week with a closer look at the performance of private equity, another nonpublicly traded investment.

The term “private equity” is used to describe various types of privately placed investments. This type of investment has grown tremendously over the past 30 years, thanks largely to increasing contributions from America’s pension funds as they search for alternatives to public equity markets in an effort to meet their return objectives.

The authors of the 2013 study “Private Equity Performance: What Do We Know?” provide some arguably unwarranted hope for venture capital investors. The authors employed a “research-quality” database from portfolio management software firm Burgiss to examine the performance of nearly 1,400 U.S. private equity (buyout and venture capital) investments. The data set was sourced from more than 200 institutional investors.

Read the rest of the article on ETF.com.