Most wealth managers and direct investors regard private equity as an optional add-on to a portfolio of listed shares. But Steffen Meister, chairman of Partners Group, argues persuasively that it has become much more than that. Baillie Gifford and other leading fund managers have been allocating funds to private equity for some time now. They note that private companies are floating on the stockmarket later, if at all. So if investors want to capture more of the value created by these firms, they must invest while they are still private.
Distrust of private-equity valuations, and the consequent slump in the share prices of private-equity trusts as discounts to net asset values (NAV) widened dramatically, led to disillusion with the sector. But confidence is slowly returning. Asset values have held up or increased, the
