2026年一季度私人资本回报晴雨表（英）2026

Return Barometers Timely insights into private market performance Contents Institutional Research Group OverviewPrivate equityVenture capitalPrivate debtInfrastructureNatural resources pbinstitutionalresearch@pitchbook.comPublished on May 12, 2026 Overview 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 trendsmore quickly. The key use cases for the Barometers include: Gaining 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 scale of 0 to 100, 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 threemonths earlier than our preliminary returns provided in PitchBook estimates of what the investment might sell for in an arm’slength 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 March 2026 with conditions at the end of Q3 2025.Across most fund strategies, the Barometers indicate a softerreturn environment relative to September. Natural resources 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 (the impliedreported quarterly returns in the charts below). For instance, PE’s 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 influence, and idiosyncratic factors play a larger role in driving For example, the PE Barometer explains 68% of the variance inquarterly desmoothed PE returns from Q1 2009 to Q3 2025.However, when isolating instances in which the Barometer Beta:The indicator’s coefficient used in the Barometer’slinear regression. The Barometer Score is most sensitive to Value:The Z-score for the indicator’s current value relative to We leveraged the model’s heightened accuracy during periods ofmarket stress to simulate, in real time, the volatility that privatefunds experienced in response to last year’s “Liberation Day” Contribution:The product of the beta and value columns. Thetotal of the contribution column is the Barometer Z-score. Additional Barometer information The PitchBook Private Capital Return Barometers are available onourInsights web page.The page is updated monthly with thelatest nowcasts and desmoothed nowcasts and includes aglossary of key definitions. For a detailed explanation of our Model features 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: Private equity The PE Barometer remains neutral with a score of 45. Thenowcast and desmoothed nowcast stand at 3.4% and 3.2%,respectively, as mixed model signals continue to offset one improving trends in business confidence and the composi