Private Equity Market in Recovery

In the past three decades there has been an increasing role of Private Equity (PE) industry in the financing of enterprises especially in case of firms that have great growth potential but are in need of external financing. Via providing financing for these enterprises PE can boost economic growth. On the other hand the different subsets of PE like Venture Capital (VC) and Buyout (BO) funds appear as an important investment class and the return characteristics of these asset classes is an indicator of the performance of the whole PE industry. The authors in their earlier works focused on the history of the return characteristics of the funds in the US and in Europe found different trends and features in the two regions with regards to the different asset classes. In this paper the authors focus on the current progress of PE industry in Europe and in the US and examine the recovery of the industry from the recession of 2008. The current trends are consistent with our former findings. In average the returns of BO funds exceeded the returns of VC funds in the US as well as in Europe. Not just according to the absolute value of the returns, but also according to its risk-return tradeoff BO seemed to be a preferable investment. The gap between the performances of BO funds was not as significant as the difference of VC funds. While the recession of 2008 affected negatively the returns of PE, the ‘dotcom’ boom of the millennia had much higher impact on the industry, and our finding is that PE returns are on a recovery course.