
April 24, 2020
Chart of the Month: Historic Recessions in the Private Markets
When we think about the potential impact of a recession on the private markets, we thought it best to look at cash flow behavior during historic recessions. Continue reading to understand the net cash flows, contribution rates and distribution rates during prior recessionary periods. Net cash flows are generally negative[...]

March 27, 2020
Chart of the Month: IRR by Vintage Year and Strategy
Understanding Historic IRR by Vintage Year within the Private Markets When we look at historic IRR by vintage year, private equity funds have the highest returns in each of the past ten vintage years. Historically, private equity has higher returns relative to credit and real assets because it is a[...]

February 21, 2020
Chart of the Month: IRR by Time Horizon and Strategy
When we view historical IRR by time horizon and strategy, we see that in the most recent quarter, private credit was the only negative returning strategy. YTD, the public markets have outperformed the private markets. However, private market strategies should be viewed over several years rather than just short-time horizons.[...]

January 24, 2020
Chart of the Month: Private Markets Annual Liquidity Ratios
By: Bryan Jenkins, Vice President, Private Market Analytics, Hamilton Lane This chart provides a snapshot of annual liquidity ratios segmented by various private markets strategies. We define the “liquidity ratio” as the ratio of distributions to contributions in a given calendar year. A liquidity ratio above the dashed lined (>[...]

December 20, 2019
Chart of the Month: IRR by Strategy and Time Horizon
Historically, Private Equity has provided the highest returns across all time horizons relative to Private Credit and Real Assets While Private Credit and Real Assets historically generate lower returns than Private Equity, Private Credit provides stable and predictable cashflows. Private Real Assets provides diversification benefits by being less correlated to[...]

November 22, 2019
Chart of the Month: Dispersion of Returns by Strategy
Each bar represents the dispersion of returns as measured as the difference in IRR between top and bottom quartile funds Historically, the difference in investing with bottom quartile managers instead of those in the top quartile in private markets is approximately 15% The purple dot represents the median IRR for[...]

October 25, 2019
Chart of the Month: Private Equity IRR by Vintage Year
Private markets often use IRR as a performance metric to measure returns over a fund's life Quartiles break down the IRRs, ranked least to greatest, for each vintage year by 25% increments of each grouping Historically top quartile funds generate significantly higher returns than bottom quartile funds Returns during the[...]

September 27, 2019
Chart of the Month: Leverage Multiples Across Vintage Years
The above chart shows how leverage multiples can dramatically impact the overall gross IRR of a deal: the highest IRR's come in deals with a 6x-8x leverage multiple (Acquisition Net Debt/EBITDA) the lowest volatility returns in deals come from investments made with a 4x-6x leverage multiple which is expected

August 23, 2019
Chart of the Month: Infrastructure Returns in Private Equity
Cobalt’s August Chart of the Month explores private equity infrastructure returns.

July 19, 2019
Capital Raised by the 20 Largest Closed-End Funds
The 20 largest funds raised each year have represented a larger portion of total private markets fundraising, but we are still off peak levels.