Communicating performance: textual and financial disclosures in private equity
New research co-authored by Josh Lerner, with Fiona Paine and Antoinette Schoar, finds that GPs know the relative quality of their portfolio companies early: in the first years of an investment that information lives in the narrative text GPs write to LPs, and only later shows up in interim valuations.
Vintage returns and the fundraising signal: what LPs should (and should not) read into a weak cohort
The 2020–2022 vintages rank among the weakest of the past two decades, and some LPs are pulling back. The historical record argues against it: weak cohorts are the ones that deployed into crowded markets, and the vintages that follow deploy into the aftermath. We test vintage-level mean reversion against Cambridge Associates data and find the fundraising signal is roughly six times stronger in venture capital than in buyout.
Continuation vehicles: what the preliminary research says
Continuation vehicles have gone from five transactions in 2018 to 85 in 2025. We review what the first wave of empirical research — including the largest CV dataset assembled to date — says about which managers launch them, which assets get transferred, how LPs decide, and whether returns actually differ.
The rise of the total portfolio approach
The rise of the total portfolio approach In November 2025, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) made headlines among allocators in formally adopting the “total portfolio approach” (TPA) investment model, replacing the strategic asset allocation (SAA) model it had previously used for investment decision-making. Guiding this choice in part was a study reporting a […]
Feeling inspired? The LP-to-founder track is more common than one might expect
While venture capital (VC) has long been recognized as playing an important role in scaling innovative startups and developing broader entrepreneurial ecosystems, the mechanisms through which this occurs have been less well documented. A new study sheds light on one such mechanism: how exposure to VC investment may help develop not just entrepreneurial firms and ecosystems, but entrepreneurs themselves. In other words, VC investment may not only finance innovation; it may also help foster and equip a new generation of entrepreneurs.
Exit stage right: private equity’s path back to liquidity
Exit stage right: private equity’s path back to liquidity The private equity market has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past several years. Following the industry’s boom in 2021—fueled by cheap debt, abundant liquidity, and a surge in deal activity following hopes that the worst of the global pandemic was past—rising interest rates and tightening […]
Do first-time funds warrant a “flight to safety?” Evidence from PE and VC
Do first-time funds warrant a “flight to safety?” Evidence from PE and VC Amid a broader private markets slowdown, heightened uncertainty has prompted LPs to shift capital toward established managers in a “flight to safety,” posing fundraising challenges for first-time funds. First-time private equity (PE) funds’ share of total PE fundraising fell from 5.9% in […]
Forecasting the future: how simulation models are transforming private market strategy
Private market investing is fundamentally about the future. Capital is committed today in anticipation of cash flows, valuations, and outcomes that may unfold over a decade or more. Yet for decades, the tools used to guide these decisions have remained anchored in the past.
Private debt: seeking alpha in the lower middle market
In this new whitepaper, commissioned by Heard Capital, Bella Private Markets investigates trends and opportunities in the lower middle market (LMM) of the private debt industry. Private debt fundraising has expanded considerably over the past decade, in part due to regulations that constrain bank lending and interest rate trends. This growth has paralleled and supported […]
AAPI-owned firms’ access to emerging manager programs
Continuing our collaboration with the Association of Asian American Investment Managers (AAAIM) on Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) representation in private markets, a new report was recently released focusing on AAPI-owned firms’ access to emerging manager programs and representation in institutional investor portfolios. Our findings indicate that despite strong performance of AAPI-owned firms, they […]