Private Equity – Investing in Public Companies
Although private equity firms normally invest in privately held companies, on occasion, some firms will invest in publicly traded companies… or will retain shares in portfolio companies that are now publicly traded.
A quick study of the www.PrivateEquityInfo.com database in late November showed 306 private equity firms collectively held 560 publicly traded-companies in their portfolios.
From these 560 publicly-traded companies, I created an equally-weighted basket of stocks (PE-basket) to track through time. Now that several months have passed, let’s check the performance (thus far) of this PE-basket relative to several benchmark ETFs.