Thank you for your excellent feedback! The role of private equity was briefly addressed in the section on interest rates. Over the past several decades, many high-quality small companies have either chosen to remain private longer or have been acquired by larger public firms or private equity investors before making the transition into the large-cap space—facilitated in part by easy access to debt financing. This phenomenon has contributed to the underperformance of small caps. However, we believe this dynamic is beginning to shift under the current higher-for-longer interest rate regime.