Perspectives Making Private Equity Everybody's Business
Oct 23, 2025
Christine Berg, Head of America's Index Products at MSCI, Peter Shepard, Global Head of Analytics R&D at MSCI, and Oliver Bunn from Goldman Sachs Asset Management dive into the evolution of tracking private equity returns. They discuss the barriers of liquidity and transparency, the importance of deep market data, and how roughly half of private equity outperformance can be attributed to public-market factors. With the launch of the MSCI World Private Equity Return Tracker, they explore how innovative ETFs can bring alternative investments into a more accessible framework.
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Replicating Private Equity Through Public Stocks
- MSCI designed the index to replicate private equity drivers through public equities for liquidity and transparency.
- The approach captures private equity-like exposures without long lock-ups or opaque pricing.
Deal-Level Data Reveals Private Equity Drivers
- MSCI had to analyze deal-by-deal data to quantify private equity leverage and characteristics.
- Only a deep private capital dataset made measuring those drivers feasible.
Scale Enables Bottom-Up Private Market Mapping
- MSCI's private markets database covers ~85,000 companies and $5 trillion in holdings, enabling bottom-up analysis.
- That depth lets researchers map private company traits to public-market style attributes.