The PE S-Curve, Dug Out

There are a couple of concepts that qualify a discovery – even if just stumbled upon: novelty and usefulness. With respect to private equity, the S-Curve adds the notion of decreasing marginal returns to improve the mainstream J-Curve notion, and this clears novelty. What’s left now is to dig out its usefulness.

IRR Alpha Looks Bigger [More Subtly Fooled #1]

When a standard of measurement of returns allows close to 70% of investment managers (GPs) to claim their funds are first quartile performers (i.e. ranked in the top 25%) (1) – such as the case of the IRR – something is obviously wrong.

Fooled by IRRs (Yale, Schwarzman’s Cases)

“Everyone loves an optical illusion, except when it comes to financial results (1)”. Yet the private markets are not immune from optical illusion risks.

Please Come In

A Dark Room is where a film is turned into clear pictures. In the DaRC Room, the risk-reward profile of private capital funds becomes immediately visible and finally intelligible within modern arbitrage pricing frameworks.