David Toll

Firm: Portfolio Advisors LLC Fund: Portfolio Advisors Private Equity Fund VII LP Target: $1 billion Amount Raised: $449 million Portfolio Advisors LLC, an advisory shop that over the last two decades has quietly amassed $30 billion in private equity and related assets under management, has hit at least $449 million on its seventh core fund […]

North Castle Partners, which famously turned lemons to lemonade with a diet company called Atkins Nutritionals Inc., is talking to prior investors about raising a fifth fund with a target of $250 million. The Greenwich, Conn.-based firm expects to reach a first closing in the neighborhood of $100 million, the size of its 2007 predecessor […]

This asset class has a kimono made of lead.For the first five years a private equity fund’s performance is obscured by the J-curve effect, in which fees and the slow drawdown of capital render return figures meaningless. In the years after that, sponsors produce interim performance numbers. Still, a big question mark hovers over the […]

The Washington State Investment Board has edged above its target allocation, thanks to private equity accounting for 25.3 percent of its $56.3 billion portfolio as of the end of September. Its target allocation is 25 percent. What that means for one of the industry’s biggest limited partners—the board committed more than $3 billion to private-equity […]

It’s gotten harder to hide in private equity. It’s especially so for firms that, like funds-of-funds manager Adams Street Partners, manage public pension money. The early 2000s saw journalists, unions and students launch a major push to pull back the curtains on private equity performance, part of a transparency movement that took hold in the […]

The paradoxes begin to appear early on in the second edition of “Pioneering Portfolio Management,” a tour de force of an investment-advice book from David F. Swensen, chief investment officer of Yale University, and required reading for any private equity professional. Swensen espouses unconventional and unorthodox thinking at every turn. Yet his investment philosophy—rooted in […]