The drumbeat of acquisitions underscores both how precious private-market data has become, and how limited the information still is. Pensions, university endowments and insurers now keep a lot of their money in long-term, hard-to-trade investments. But private-asset management firms often keep basic insights about those assets under wraps. Information their clients take for granted in public markets, including what investments perform best or the makeup of common indexes, can be guarded as closely as state secrets.
| less than a minute read
Investors clamor for a peek behind the private markets curtain
“It’s frustrating to have this lack of detail,” said Alaska state fund investment chief Marcus Frampton, who can only guess at why his $15 billion private-equity portfolio underperformed a widely used benchmark last fiscal year. (He thinks it was biotech losses.) U.S. state and local pension investment in private market assets Source: Boston College Center for Retirement Research
