This analysis shows that net-of-fees private debt fund returns outperform bond and equity market benchmarks. The authors find that lagged performance as well as credit market conditions strongly affect private debt fund performance.
Overview
This paper examines net-of-fees private debt fund performance, performance persistence across funds managed by the same general partner and a general partner’s ability to time the market. We document that private debt funds outperform bond and equity market benchmarks in the cross-section, with high performance dispersion across strategies and performance quartiles. Lagged performance significantly affects current fund performance. While ex ante and ex post credit market conditions strongly affect fund performance, general partners can only partially time them.