PE is consolidating, but why now? View PitchBook’s 2Q 2017 US PE Breakdown Report Here It wasn’t by much, but the US private equity field shrank last year for the first time in over a decade. By year-end, 4,248 PE firms still had their lights on, a 1.3% decline from year-end 2015. Industry observers have been

Mega-funds on the Comeback For a preliminary peek at second quarter PE numbers in PitchBook’s upcoming Breakdown Report, please refer to the linked infographic. Through the first half of the year, mega-funds of $10 billion or more in size have made a strong comeback in the U.S. and Europe. Five such private equity funds have already

Global PE Buyout Multiples and Deal Flow View PitchBook’s 2017 Analyst Note: Where can PE firms find attractive valuations? Here Global buyout activity has gradually surpassed median EBITDA levels following the financial crisis. Creeping up to 10.2x on the eve of the crisis, LBO valuations have oscillated in the 8x-9x range dating back to 2010,...

Digesting Elephants: What Happens Next with SBOs? View PitchBook’s 2017 PE & VC Exits Here Secondary buyouts have been artificially propped up by the inflated volume of crisis-era investments for the past few years. “Like a snake digesting an elephant’s worth of assets,” as Bain & Co. phrased it, PE deals made from 2005 to 2008...

Exit multiples have stayed steady at an elevated level View PitchBook’s 2017 PE & VC Exits Here Slowly but surely, exit multiples for secondary buyouts and corporate acquisitions have risen over the past two years, with figures for the former topping off at 9.4x last year. Thus far in 2017, the aggregate figure for all transaction

Is this the new normal for buyout firms? View PitchBook’s 2017 Global PE Deal Multiples Report: Part II Here Multiple datasets can help convey certain aspects of why the current private equity environment may represent a new normal in terms of dealmaking, yet one of the more telling is one that depicts the type of the

The maturation of the buyout industry View PitchBook’s 2017 Global PE & VC Fund Benchmarking Report: Part II Here To conclude our analysis of select topics grounded in fund performance data, we must discuss a topic that has become increasingly prevalent as of late: the maturation of the buyout industry and what that entails for

PE’s historical performance still allures in a market plagued by uncertainty View PitchBook’s 2017 Global PE & VC Fund Benchmarking Report: Part II Here Comparing the returns of different strategies is difficult enough, given the typical disparities in approach. Assessing private equity’s performance relative to that of public markets is even more challenging,...

Finishing strong View PitchBook’s 2017 Global PE & VC Fund Benchmarking Report: Part II Here In the prior installment of the Pulse of Private Equity, we discussed how the cyclicality of the PE industry was coming to bear, as the momentum and speed with which more recent fund vintages could return money to their investors

Cyclicality of PE industry coming to bear? View PitchBook’s 2017 Global PE & VC Fund Benchmarking Report: Part II Here From the rhythmic ebb and flow of the tide to the mysterious circadian patterns within each human, the world is governed by cycles. When it comes to private equity investment and fundraising, multiple separate cycles