The problem with the Midas List is that it focuses on individuals when venture capital is a team sport; it’s like giving a medal only to the member of a relay team who crosses the finish line, says guest columnist Mahendra Ramsinghani.

It is probably time to put to rest the question of whether, over nearly three decades, U.S. buyout shops have on average outperformed the public equity markets. They have.

With the rollout of its own private equity benchmark, the Institutional Limited Partners Association is seeking to give its members a measurement system that is “institutionally relevant,” said Michael Elio, the association’s managing director of industry affairs

One of the fundamental principles guiding investors in private equity has been that of persistence of performance. If investors want to back a top-quartile fund, and they all do, a good starting point has been to make sure the predecessor funds were top-quartile.

Private-equity firms have generally been conservative when it comes to valuing their portfolio investments—with the exception, no big surprise, of when they’re in the market raising money, according to a new academic paper.

A key private equity and venture capital index measuring returns in Australia rose by 2.90% in the third quarter of 2012, according to a report from the Australian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association. For the 12 months ending September, the index rose by 6.44%, but trailed the S&P/ASX 300 Index’s gain of 14.46%.

Riding high on their access to top venture funds, endowments left other categories of limited partners in the dust, performance-wise, in the 1990s. But by the following decade they had largely lost their Midas touch.

A new research paper finds that defined benefit pension plans managing the largest private equity portfolios outperform those managing the smallest ones.

The giant Texas Teachers’ Retirement System committed more than $1.1 billion to private equity across seven investments in the fourth quarter, with some pledges going to long-time partners and some to new relationships…

How are U.S. venture capital funds performing? Depends on which time frame one looks at, and whether one focuses on portfolio value or cash returns. But overall, new data from Cambridge Associates shows VC performance improving over a 10-year time frame but third- quarter write-downs weighed on results.