How to build a successful private equity portfolio

The route to a successful private equity portfolio is a four‐step process that requires an in‐depth understanding of private equity as an asset class as well as the skills to select promising opportunities from available offerings. The first step is to set out and define general allocation guidelines. These initial guidelines then have to be refined based on the availability of adequate investment opportunities. The third step involves selecting the most attractive funds from a pool of target funds. And lastly the portfolio must be monitored on an ongoing basis to track its overall development as well as its enduring performance. Benchmarking the overall performance of the portfolio as well as individual managers is an integral part of this. In the following sections, each individual step is discussed and explained in more detail. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.