2025年第四季度私人资本回报晴雨表

Timely insights into private market performance Contents Institutional Research Group OverviewPrivate equityVenture capitalPrivate debtInfrastructureNatural resources Susan HuQuantitative Research Analystsusan.hu@pitchbook.com pbinstitutionalresearch@pitchbook.com Published on February 13, 2026 The PitchBook Private Capital Return Barometers are a suite ofmodels designed to evaluate the current return environment forUS private market funds—encompassing PE, VC, private debt,infrastructure, and natural resources. These models provide a quarterly returns, or “nowcasts,” that help surface emerging trendsfaster. The key use cases for the Barometers include: Providing insight into the economic and market exposures in Nowcasting returns monthly to provide more real-timereadings before quarterly returns are available. Identifying periods where reported returns deviate from The advantages of PitchBook's Barometers Private market returns tend to move more slowly and are far lesstransparent than those in public markets. Aside from maintainingan active private market allocation and receiving periodic updatesfrom GPs, participants often must wait several months for closed- Understanding the Barometer scores Our framework generates a Barometer Score, which we recalibrateto a 0 to 100 scale, where a score of 50 represents a neutralexpectation of average returns for a given fund strategy. Wedefine a neutral environment as falling within +/- two-thirds of astandard deviation from the Barometer’s mean. The neutral To bridge this reporting gap and provide a timelier view of privatemarket fund performance, we developed the PitchBook PrivateCapital Return Barometers, a factor-based framework designed to These scores allow us to compare the relative market conditionsacross fund strategies and time, while also producing a real-timeestimate of quarterly fund returns, which are available three estimates of what the investment might sell for in an arm’s-length transaction. This practice can introduce bias into reportedfund NAVs, leading to understated volatility and correlations, and To address this distortion, we adjust the reported return series byestimating and reintroducing the missing volatility. The result is a“desmoothed” return series that more accurately reflects the trueunderlying economic reality of private market performance. In the chart on the previous page, we compare the returnlandscape of December 2025 with conditions at the end of Q22025. Across all fund strategies except natural resources, the Improved explanatory power in high-variance periods The Barometer typically moves within the neutral zone, butreadings outside this range carry particular significance. Whenfocusing on periods of high variance—greater than two-thirds of a The scores are directly associated with the nowcasts (that is,implied reported quarterly returns in the charts below). Forinstance, PE’s Barometer Score of 47 for Q4 2025 corresponds to During times of extreme market optimism or pessimism,indicators tend to move in sync, driven largely by macroeconomicforces, much like a rising or falling tide. In contrast, during Reported versus desmoothed returns Private market investments are typically priced infrequently(most often on a quarterly basis) and often rely on unaudited created separate time series for both the level and the trend ofeach indicator. In each fund strategy section of this report, weprovide a table detailing the specific indicators used to model exert less influence, and idiosyncratic factors play a larger role in For example, the PE Barometer explains 73% of the variance inquarterly desmoothed PE returns from Q1 2009 to Q2 2025.However, when isolating instances in which the Barometerdeviates by more than two-thirds of a standard deviation from Beta: The indicator’s coefficient used in the Barometer’s linearregression. The Barometer Score is most sensitive to Value: The Z-score for the indicator’s current value relative to Contribution: This represents the product of the Beta andValue columns. The total of the Contribution column is the We leveraged the model’s heightened accuracy during periods ofmarket stress to simulate, in real time, the volatility that privatefunds experienced in response to this year’s Liberation Day tariff Additional Barometer information Model features The PitchBook Private Capital Return Barometers are available onourInsights webpageand updated monthly with the latest The indicators used in the Barometers are selected based on afundamental view of return drivers in each respective fundstrategy. These indicators fall into six broad categories: nowcasts and desmoothed nowcasts, including a glossary of keydefinitions. For a detailed explanation of our methodology, please Private equity The PE Barometer remains in neutral territory with a score of 47,producing a nowcast of 3.4% and a desmoothed nowcast of 3.5%for Q4 2025. While the Barometer declined for the first time