Bison Open Benchmark

by goksor

Bison launches a new benchmark for private equity and venture capital. The benchmark is available for free at Bison.co as of today October 15, 2014. This new benchmark will help investors evaluate managers against peers and indicate institutional investors ability to pick winners.

Since launching in 2011, Bison has worked with institutional investors to collect performance data for private funds. Over 200 partners now contribute to the data set. Together, they provide ongoing updates on over 20,000 investments for 3,700 different funds in private equity and venture capital. Bison now has an open private equity data set where each source is visible.

The Bison benchmark will avoid many of the shortcomings for private equity benchmarks. Full transparency will help investors control for outliers among peers in the benchmark and also see number of known commitments to a fund. At the same time, where the Bison data comes directly from a variety of institutional investors, it includes both small and large funds, winners and losers, and a consistent core representation of funds. What is more, the Bison benchmark includes a unique view into how returns for different vintage years grow over time. This year-to-year measurement will help investors see if their managers are trending above or below the median for a vintage year.

“The industry has been looking for a new benchmark for a long time. An open benchmark will help investors like public pensions, endowments, and foundations understand their performance in the asset class, but also help the public see how well their money is being cared for,” says Michael Nugent, CEO, at Bison. He concludes, “We at Bison wants to make it easy for everyone to understand performance in private equity.”

Download our free private equity benchmark at www.bison.co.