Venture Capital Continues To Shine
We have previously covered the Thomson Reuters Private Equity Buyout Index and the Thomson Reuters Venture Capital Index - both of these indices use public market comparisons to attempt to replicate the Thomson Reuters Buyout and Venture Capital Benchmark Indexes, two different indexes which use private company valuations in the United States. Thomson Reuters and Chicago-based DSC Quantitative Group built the two public market versions almost a decade ago now.
It appears that the performance trends we observed earlier continue to persist - namely, the performance of Private Equity seems to be converging with overall equities, while Venture Capital is outperforming, supporting their “smart money” nickname.
Source: AlphaBot
The stats for the Venture Capital index are quite impressive, outperforming all 3 other instruments in our comparison - January 2020 to January 2021, not full calendar year 2020 - by a considerable margin of almost 12% vs the Nasdaq 100 and almost 40% (!) vs the S&P 500.
Source: AlphaBot
To get a better insight into the source of such a dramatic performance difference we looked at the sector composition in the January Factsheets for each index, available on DSCQ.com, and noticed that the largest difference is in sector allocation to the technology sector - 78% for the Venture Capital index vs only 35% for the Private Equity one.
The allocations are perhaps not surprising, given the tech-heavy nature of venture capital investing and the continued bull run in US tech stocks in part due to the tailwind given to them by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. But what’s equally interesting is that it appears that you can get venture capital returns without needing a 10- or other multi-year lock on your investment. From the start of the live index in October 2012 it amounts to slightly more than an 800% total return.
We will continue monitoring this interesting pair of indices and covering them in future posts, so stay tuned. But in the meantime, we’ll leave it to the VCs and the VC replication disciples to see who can truly claim bragging rights here.
**********
Dmitri Alexeev is Founder and CEO of AlphaBot
***The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of AlphaWeek or its publisher, The Sortino Group
© The Sortino Group Ltd
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency or other Reprographic Rights Organisation, without the written permission of the publisher. For more information about reprints from AlphaWeek, click here.
