David Toll

Mike Nugent, a co-founder and chief executive of Bison, a five-year-old company that provides an online platform for investor-relations professionals, left the company earlier this month. Why Nugent left is unclear, although a source familiar with the situation noted that the venture-backed company has brought in a strategic investor. Buyouts was unable to reach executives at Bison […]

Pension giant Massachusetts PRIM has outdistanced many of its peers in the race to achieve top-quartile private equity returns. Are the superior results just a fluke? A working paper issued recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that its outperformance stems from skill and not just chance. The four authors compared the returns achieved by investors with those that would have resulted had they picked funds […]

Pension giant Massachusetts PRIM has outdistanced many of its peers in the race to achieve top-quartile private equity returns. Are the superior results just a fluke? A working paper issued last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that its outperformance stems from skill and not just chance. The four authors compared the returns achieved by investors with those that would have resulted had they picked funds at random. […]

Pension giant Massachusetts PRIM has outdistanced many of its peers in the race to achieve top-quartile private equity returns. Are the superior results just a fluke? A working paper issued last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that its outperformance stems from skill and not just chance. The four authors compared the returns achieved by investors with those that would have resulted had they picked funds […]

Madison Capital’s recent push into technology lending is bearing fruit. The Chicago mid-market lender, which in the first quarter formalized and beefed up what had been an ad hoc approach to technology, has racked up six tech platform deals so far this year, with two more expected to close by the end of October and as many as four more […]

A June paper on private equity performance published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and covered by New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson makes a case that investors should cool their excitement for the asset class. “Do PE buyout funds deliver outsized returns to investors and will they do so in the future?” ask […]

JMK Consumer Growth Partners, an investor in skincare-product company Supergoop, could be heading out soon to raise a debut fund earmarked for growth equity investments. In an interview with Buyouts, co-founder John M. Kenney said he’d like to raise $100 million — and no more than that — for the fund. In fact, Kenney said, should the first […]

Ready to get your first fund raised?  Better make sure not to give up too much of the economics to an anchor investor. That early, anchor investor can play a key role in your fundraise by convincing other investors that your fund is viable. But give up too much carried interest and investors will wonder if […]

The long-simmering question of whether buyout shops have to register as broker-dealers erupted this month in the form of a Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action against Blackstreet Capital Management LLC. In a June 1 order, the SEC found that Blackstreet Capital had violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by performing its own brokerage services — prospecting […]

Chalk up one more reason that internal rates of return can be misleading — and one more reason that the industry needs to emphasize that they are not equivalent to compound annual growth rates. With interest rates low, growing numbers of buyout firms use capital-call bridging facilities to cover the equity portions of their deals in the early months. Sometimes the loans cover […]