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 Overview3 Jacobie FullertonQuantitative Research Analystjacobie.fullerton@pitchbook.com Private equity6 Venture capital Private debt12 Published on May 12, 2026 Infrastructure15 Natural resources18 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 adata-driven assessment of private market performance, leveragingmacroeconomic and market-fundamental factors to quantifyreturn trends. Collectively, we refer to these models as thePitchBook Private Capital Barometers, or simply the “Barometers.” 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 inaggregate fund strategy returns. •Nowcasting returns monthly to provide more real-timereadings before quarterly returns are available.•Identifying periods where reported returns deviate fromfundamental expectations. 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-end funds to report performance before gaining a clear,comprehensive view of returns. Even then, fund net asset values(NAVs) and returns can lag shifts in the broader macroeconomicenvironment. 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 neutralenvironment typically encompasses about 50% of all observations,assuming a normal distribution. Scores beyond the neutralthreshold are classified as negative or positive, with the minimumand maximum scores (0 and 100) representing a 1.5 standard-deviation move. While these cutoffs are somewhat arbitrary, theyprovide a quantifiable structure for interpreting returns and shouldbe viewed as guideposts rather than strict boundaries. 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 toestimate returns in near real time. The Barometers distill marketfundamentals into a single score, quantifying the current state ofthe US closed-end fund return landscape and producing implied 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 PitchBookBenchmarks reports. While the Barometers provide valuabledirectional insights, they are not forecasts of realized fundperformance and should be interpreted as indicators of marketconditions rather than precise return predictions. 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 andultimately producing “smoothed” return patterns. 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.Because it is valuable to understand both perspectives, weprovide two measures: a “nowcast” that estimates reportedreturns and a “desmoothed nowcast” that estimates desmoothedreturns. 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 resourcesstands out as a strong exception. Current readings remain largelywithin the neutral zone, suggesting expectations for near-averageQ1 2026 returns, though natural resources is near the upper edgeof neutral territory. 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 astandard deviation—the Barometers demonstrate strongerexplanatory power. The scores are directly associated with the nowcasts (the impliedreported quarterly returns in the charts below). For instance, PE’sBarometer Score of 45 for Q1 2026 corresponds to an impli