Private equity firms currently hold 108 positions in publicly-traded consumer services companies. The breakdown is shown below.

Private equity firms currently hold ~700 positions in publicly-traded companies. Nearly three-fourths of these positions are in the healthcare, consumer services, technology, finance and energy sectors. Private equity investments in healthcare companies is the largest sector focus (32% of investments).

Update: Read our follow-on study showing Private Equity Investments in Public Healthcare Companies

This time last year, there were a total of 6,713 publicly-traded companies on the three major U.S. stock exchanges (NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX). This year, there are 6,783 for a net gain of 70 publicly-traded companies.

Listed Companies by Exchange

• NYSE – net down 20 companies (3,170 to 3,150)
• NASDAQ – net up 93 companies (3,183 to 3,276)
• AMEX – net down 3 companies (360 to 357)

Market Capitalization by Exchange

The total market capitalization for these companies collectively increased from $34.2 trillion to $41.2 trillion, a 20.4% increase. The breakdown by exchange:

• NYSE = $29.0 trillion
• NASDAQ = $12.1 trillion
• AMEX = $0.129 trillion

% Market Cap Represented by the Top 5% of Companies

The largest companies dominate the total market capitalization of publicly-traded companies, especially on the NASDAQ. Top 5% of companies’ contribution to total market capitalization:

• NYSE = 59%
• NASDAQ = 78%
• AMEX = 66%

Clearly, the market cap of the big tech titans (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Intel, Cisco, etc.) figure heavily into the NASDAQ total value.

A year ago, I created a portfolio of 655 publicly-traded stocks based on private equity ownership in each company. I called it the “PE-basket”.

When I checked the performance of this PE-basket at the 6-month mark, it was lagging the performance of the general market. However, now that a full year has passed, the PE-basket has in fact out-performed the broad market as well as the other benchmarks I selected.

There are numerous types of business investors and a multitude of names by which they are coined; angel, seed, start-up, venture capital, private equity, mezzanine, leveraged buyout, management buyout, public companies, etc.

Investors are usually more active within a certain bandwidth corresponding to the growth cycle of a company from birth to maturity. A simplistic view is to divide investors into the following main categories, which coincide with the phases of a company’s maturing process:

• Angel – founding
• Venture Capital – early stage
• Private Equity – growth phase
• Mezzanine – growth/maturing
• Public – mature

I previously discussed creating a portfolio of 560 publicly-traded stocks based on private equity ownership in each company (the PE-basket). While the last post focused on the overall performance of the PE-basket relative to benchmarks, I thought it would be insightful to look at individual company gains and losses within this basket.

While the average return for the PE-basket was 4.0% over a five-month period, 41 of these companies returned greater than 50%, 11 companies topped 100% and three companies exceeded 200%!

The Top Performers (with 100%+ Returns)

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.

www.PrivateEquityInfo.com has launched a new data module of Public Companies.

The new public company data module allows subscribers to keyword search the business profiles of the largest 4,000 publicly traded companies on the NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX exchanges.

The key benefit of the keyword search is the ability to quickly find those firms that present a match for a very targeted search term. Why search by SIC, NAICS or other industry codes when you can search on exactly the terms that interest you?