AgPa #72: Machine-Reading of Private Equity Prospectuses

Limited Partners versus Unlimited Machines: Artificial Intelligence and the Performance of Private Equity Funds (2023)
Reiner Braun, Borja Fernández Tamayo, Florencio López-de-Silanes, Ludovic Phalippou, Natalia Sigrist
CEFS Research Paper, URL/SSRN

This week’s AGNOSTIC Paper is somewhat outside my major area of competence, but I think it is a good example where we are heading to in the investment industry. Over the last years, it became quite standard that investors use the latest tools of machine learning to analyze non-quantitative information like text or images at a scale that hasn’t been possible before. So far, however, the efforts were mostly focused on public markets. In their not yet published working paper, this week’s authors show that there seems to be also a lot of potential for such methods in private markets.

  • Portfolio Company, Management Team, Investment Opportunity – The most common words of PE-managers
  • The complexity of PE-fund documents is related to fundraising success and performance
  • Machine learning and text data helps to select PE-funds
  • The machines seem to pick up meaningful concepts

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AgPa #56: The Equity Risk Premium of Small Businesses

Small Business Equity Returns: Empirical Evidence from the Business Credit Card Securitization Market (2023)
Matthias Fleckenstein, Francis A. Longstaff
The Journal of Finance 78(1), URL

In 2020, there were more than 31M small private businesses in the US. Even though the estimated value of those businesses is “just” $12T, the sheer number is astonishing when compared to about 4,000 tradable US stocks (excluding penny stocks). For stocks, we typically use measures like returns, multiples, and volatilities. But given the lack of daily prices, it is difficult to calculate those measures for small private businesses. This week’s AGNOSTIC Paper is an attempt to change that…

  • Small businesses had an equity risk premium of 10.7% and a volatility of 56%
  • Robustness: the model generates plausible results for S&P 500 stocks

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