Model firms vie to pinpoint ‘X factor’ in private equity, property

Difficulties gathering data plague efforts to determine correlation between private and publicly traded assets

Investors are pressing for improvements to risk models for private assets as they look to boost exposures to private equity and real estate.

According to a BlackRock survey of institutional investors in January, almost a third of investors want to increase exposure to private equity and nearly two-fifths want to increase exposure to private real estate. But modelling the risk of these assets is notoriously tricky because of the scarcity of data to base models on, and because of the challenge of