America’s largest and most influential pension fund has laid down the law on all private equity firms hoping to stay in its good graces or land new commitments. The $235 billion California Pubic Employees Retirement System has told private equity firms that from March 1, 2012 forward, they will have to comply with its new ILPA-style terms on capital calls and distributions. Or else.

Ask limited partners what manner of funds they have an appetite for and the answer often includes secondary funds.

In a city known for cultivating teams with winning records, be it the Giants or the 49ers, the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System has built a private equity portfolio whose performance tops anything I’ve come across. The diversified, 249-fund portfolio, dating back to 1987, has achieved an overall investment multiple of 1.65x as of June [...]

ACON Investments plans to hold a first close of more than $200 million on its third fund sometime in the next couple of weeks, Buyouts reported earlier today, citing two sources. Such a closing suggests ACON is off to a promising start in raising capital for its third fund, for which it hopes to raise [...]

Amid the hoopla of The Blackstone Group’s S-1 filing back in early 2007 I don’t recall too many reporters focusing on investment returns. Through year-end 2006, the firm had generated on its corporate private equity portfolio a net IRR to investors of 22.8 percent per year for the previous 19 years. That’s simply an incredible [...]

Want to catch up on the slideshows that your peers found most interesting on peHUB this week? Here are the top 10 slideshows that garnered the most pageviews from regular readers from Aug. 1 to Aug. 5. They focused on how the biggest VC-backed IPOs fared in the market wipeout on Thursday, VC performance numbers from CalPERS, a review of the year’s biggest PR disasters, and the proliferating number of bank spin-outs in the market seeking money.

1. How This Year’s Ten Biggest VC-Backed IPOs Fared In The Market Plunge by Lawrence Aragon
2. CalPERS’s 2008 Banner Year For VC: Top Commitments And Current IRRs by Mark Boslet
3. CalPERS’s Mid-Decade Enthusiasm: More Funds, Greater Diversification In 2007 by Mark Boslet
4. If You Thought Airbnb’s PR Crisis Was Bad… by Connie Loizos
5. Spinning Their Way To New Investors by Jon Marino
6. Idaho Public Employee Retirement System Top Performing Funds by David M. Toll
7. Spotify And Other Top European Deals in 2011 by Alastair Goldfisher (subscribers only)
8. Textbook Startups Raise Big VC Rounds by Joanna Glasner
9. VCs Tackle Baldness, Love Handles, And Assorted Blemishes With Big Bucks by Joanna Glasner
10. Who’s Getting Rich Off of the Dunkin’ IPO? Here Are the Top Shareholders, by Luisa Beltran (subscribers only)

Freeman Spogli & Co. has finally closed its sixth fund with $735 million in commitments, Partner Bill Wardlaw told sister magazine Buyouts.

The fund fell well short of its $1 billion target. But, said Wardlaw, “given the fundraising environment, we were pleased with what we got.”

There must be some relief and exhaustion on the part of Wardlaw and his colleagues too.

Redemption, of a sort, is likely to come to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System following Apollo’s initial public offering, which is set for Wednesday.

In June 2007, CalPERS and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority each bought 30 million non-voting shares in Apollo Global Management, for which each giant investor paid $600 million, or $20 per share. Those shares together represented an 18 percent stake in the company.

The following year, the financial crisis pummeled these stakes. In 2009, according to Pensions & Investments, these shares fell on private exchanges to just $6 a share, a drop of nearly 70 percent from their purchase price.

Adding to the anxiety over the drop in value was the fact that CalPERS was sold on the deal by Alfred Villalobos, a placement agent who is now under investigation for bribing CalPERS officials with lavish travel and gifts in order to secure investments for firms that he represented, including Apollo.

Looking for return data? We have return data. Or rather, we have links to return data.

Click “read more” below to get links to return data from nine pensions. The editorial team of sister publication Buyouts Magazine has been hard at work compiling all these numbers into a spreadsheet for our annual look at industry returns. Altogether our database has 443 U.S. and international buyout funds and turnaround/distressed funds spanning vintage years 1981 to 2005. Of those, we have investment multiples for 366 of them. And the quartile dividing lines? These probably won’t come as a big surprise for dedicated students of industry performance. It takes an investment multiple of 2 to crach the top quartile, 1.5 is median and 1.2 marks the bottom quartile.