
December 18, 2019
Trends to Watch in 2020: A Webinar Recap
Last week, our friends at DealCloud hosted a webinar about trends to watch in 2020. This webinar, featuring perspectives from the deal maker, fund manager and technology angle, discussed the factors that will impact the market most heavily. Read on to learn more about our key takeaways from the webinar.[...]

November 22, 2019
Chart of the Month: Dispersion of Returns by Strategy
Each bar represents the dispersion of returns as measured as the difference in IRR between top and bottom quartile funds Historically, the difference in investing with bottom quartile managers instead of those in the top quartile in private markets is approximately 15% The purple dot represents the median IRR for[...]

November 19, 2019
Bridging the Data Gap between GPs and LPs – Key Takeaways
On Wednesday, November 6th, Cobalt & MVision Private Equity Advisers co-hosted an event around how GPs and LPs can bridge the data gap. This event featured Jim Strang, Managing Director and Head of EMEA for Hamilton Lane, and Chris Davison, Partner at Permira, discussing the attraction of European investments, the[…]

November 11, 2019
Market Insights: 3Q 2019
Cobalt Market Insights is just a sample of the intelligence that can be gained from the Market Analysis part of the Cobalt LP platform. Investors are using our comprehensive, accurate, and timely market data to drive portfolio construction and investment selection decisions.

November 6, 2019
How Limited Partners are Embracing Data and Technology
Learn more about how limited partners are embracing data and technology in today’s private markets by partnering with Hamilton Lane and Cobalt LP for: Running diligence on potential investments by leveraging the power of Hamilton Lane’s Fund Investment Team for qualitative and quantitative evaluation. Continuous monitoring of their active investments[…]

October 25, 2019
Chart of the Month: Private Equity IRR by Vintage Year
Private markets often use IRR as a performance metric to measure returns over a fund's life Quartiles break down the IRRs, ranked least to greatest, for each vintage year by 25% increments of each grouping Historically top quartile funds generate significantly higher returns than bottom quartile funds Returns during the[...]

October 8, 2019
Deal Level Metrics: A Quick Overview
Deal level metrics enable LPs to evaluate how a manager is adding value to the underlying companies within a fund. Metrics can also be used to help LPs understand the risk associated with an investment, the overall health of the investment and benchmark the investment to the broader markets (in[...]

September 27, 2019
Chart of the Month: Leverage Multiples Across Vintage Years
The above chart shows how leverage multiples can dramatically impact the overall gross IRR of a deal: the highest IRR's come in deals with a 6x-8x leverage multiple (Acquisition Net Debt/EBITDA) the lowest volatility returns in deals come from investments made with a 4x-6x leverage multiple which is expected

September 24, 2019
New Deal Level Benchmarks
We've revamped the deal level benchmarks in Cobalt LP to provide our clients with best-in-class access to Hamilton Lane's proprietary data. A sampling of the new deal level dataset... To learn more about the other features within Cobalt LP, click here.

September 16, 2019
The Unicorn Playbook: 2019 Edition
By: Roderick Berry, Managing Director at Hamilton Lane In the investment world, the term “Unicorn” is widely understood to represent a privately-held company that has reached a billion-dollar valuation. In 2013, when venture capitalist Aileen Lee first coined the term, 39 such companies were in existence. However, as of June[...]