Thank you for your comment, Gregory.

I understand that, as an academic, you might be upset by some of the content and comments in this article, but my intention is simply to make everyone aware of the major issues related to PE performance studies.

If you are implying that the Bain & Co, Richard Ennis and CEM Benchmarking data are out of date (even though they relate to performance up to 2019), I look forward to reading your more up to date information.

Please bear in mind that, as I explained in Part I of this series, any vintage that is only a few years old reports interim (that is mostly unrealised) IRRs; therefore its performance is open to widespread manipulation. Only funds that are fully realised can be entirely trusted, although it does not prevent the use of credit lines, quick flips and divi recaps discusssed earlier.

You claim to have fully comprehensive and pristine data straight from LPs, I look forward to reading your research. It would be the first of its kind. I clearly stated in this piece and the previous instalments that all the academic studies are based on a few hundred fund data at best, which risks making them unrepresentative. If yours is fully representative, please publish it for your peers to review.

If you are aware of studies that include the entire population of PE firms and funds, please share it with all of us. I doubt that such a dataset is available, but I am happy to be proven wrong.