When Fund Selection Is No Longer Enough w/ HarbourVest’s John Toomey
HarbourVest CEO John Toomey joins Hugh MacArthur to discuss how private equity investing is evolving beyond traditional vintage-year fund picking toward active portfolio management. Toomey explains how secondary markets, continuation vehicles, and middle-market co-investments are transforming LP liquidity and capital allocation. He also outlines how HarbourVest leverages proprietary analytics and unbundles its intellectual property to evaluate manager alpha and create tailored market exposures.
- In public equities and fixed income, secondary trading dwarfs primary issuance, but private equity historically inverted this structure by treating 10-year commitments as set-and-forget allocations. Read →
- GP-led continuation vehicles now represent roughly half of the entire secondary market, shifting from an emergency liquidity valve into a standard tool for active portfolio management. Read →
- HarbourVest opened its proprietary GP Alpha analytics engine to institutional clients to evaluate underlying asset selection. Read →
- The private equity co-investment market has split into two separate models: mega-fund syndication desks on one end and middle-market co-underwriting partnerships on the other. Read →
- Fund managers boasting a 2.6x MOIC and a 24% net IRR from 2015 to 2017 vintages are getting turned down by institutional allocators because those numbers only sit in the second quartile for that era. Read →