Public pension plan data released by the American Investment Council, with help from analytics provider Bison, show that the median private equity return outperformed all other asset classes over the trailing 10 years ended June 30, 2015. Private equity allocations returned 11.4% over the period, followed by public equity, which returned 7.6%. During the period, the median total plan return was 8.6%.
Also of note, the bottom quartile of private equity returns across the 155 plans surveyed outperformed the top quartile of public equity returns by 1.8%.
The average allocation to private equity investments was 9.2%, compared to public equity and fixed income allocations of 45.9% and 25.8%, respectively. Private equity saw significant interest in 2015, with 88% of the plans surveyed committing capital.