New York, USA — MSCI has announced the launch of the MSCI All Country Public + Private Equity Index, marking a major step toward measuring total global equity exposure across both listed markets and private equity within a single, daily benchmark.
Launch Overview
MSCI Inc. has introduced the MSCI All Country Public + Private Equity Index, a new daily index designed to give investors a more complete and realistic view of their global equity portfolios. By combining public market exposure from MSCI ACWI IMI with a modeled view of private equity, the index aims to reflect how modern portfolios actually allocate capital—across both liquid and illiquid assets. The launch signals a structural shift: equity performance measurement is no longer confined to listed markets alone, but extended to include private capital as a core component of the equity opportunity set.
Key Launch Details
- Index Name: MSCI All Country Public + Private Equity Index
- Issuer: MSCI Inc. (NYSE: MSCI)
- Objective: Provide a daily, global equity index that integrates public market equities and private equity into one framework
- Core Components:
- MSCI ACWI IMI – represents the full set of publicly listed equities across developed and emerging markets and serves as a benchmark for approximately USD 5.6 trillion in assets under management¹
- MSCI All Country Private Equity Index – a daily measure based on LP-sourced cash flows and valuations from nearly 10,000 private equity funds
- Target Allocation: 15% private equity, with the remainder in public equities
- Frequency: Calculated daily
- Rebalancing: Quarterly, with weighting factors reset to the target allocations using the latest component data
- Methodology Principles: Transparency, consistency, and alignment with MSCI’s established index design and maintenance standards
Why This Launch Matters
Institutional portfolios have steadily increased allocations to private markets, especially private equity, as they seek diversification, return enhancement, and exposure to companies that never reach public listings. Yet, performance measurement and benchmarking have often lagged behind this reality—public markets are tracked daily, while private markets are typically benchmarked using infrequent, lagged valuations.
MSCI’s new index directly addresses this gap by presenting a combined view of public and private equity within one coherent, daily-updated framework. Instead of treating private equity as an unconnected sleeve, investors can now observe how total equity exposure behaves when both listed and unlisted assets are considered together.
For asset owners, multi-asset allocators, and consultants, this index introduces a more realistic representation of portfolio risk and return. It can help support policy benchmark design, strategic asset allocation discussions, and performance evaluation that matches the way capital is actually deployed across public and private equity markets.
Product Features — Deep Dive
Integrated Public + Private Equity Construction
The MSCI All Country Public + Private Equity Index is built by combining two existing building blocks:
- MSCI ACWI IMI – capturing large, mid and small cap securities across developed and emerging markets
- MSCI All Country Private Equity Index – reflecting private equity exposures modeled from LP-level cash flows and valuations across nearly 10,000 funds
This structure allows investors to view public and private equity in a single metric while preserving the characteristics and methodologies of each underlying index.
Daily Calculation and Drift-Based Weights
The index is calculated on a daily basis, using the drifted weight and the daily performance of both component indices. This approach supports more timely tracking of total equity exposure, aligning private equity benchmarking more closely with the daily cadence of public markets.
15% Target Allocation to Private Equity
The methodology sets a 15% target allocation to private equity, reflecting a representative level of exposure for diversified institutional portfolios. Actual weights may drift with market performance between rebalancing dates, but are reset to the target mix during scheduled reviews.
Quarterly Rebalancing for Consistency
The index is reviewed and rebalanced quarterly. At each review, the latest available data from both component indices is incorporated, and the weighting factors are reset to the target allocations. Rebalancing is conducted in line with MSCI’s broader index maintenance policies to ensure continuity and comparability over time.
Transparent Methodology and Governance
The new index leverages MSCI’s index construction principles, governance processes, and data infrastructure. The methodology emphasizes transparency in how public and private exposures are combined, how allocations are set and maintained, and how data is incorporated into the index over time.
Executive Quote
“This index is a milestone in our mission to make private markets more transparent and accessible,” said Luke Flemmer, Head of Private Assets at MSCI. “It reflects MSCI’s unique combination of high-quality data, world class research and index distribution capabilities and extends our private assets toolkit that gives investors a simpler way to access, benchmark, and allocate to private capital.”
Industry & Market Context
Private equity has evolved from a niche allocation to a core building block in many institutional portfolios. Large asset owners, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and endowments now routinely deploy significant capital to private strategies in search of differentiated returns and exposure to innovation that might not be available in public markets.
At the same time, regulators, boards and stakeholders increasingly demand more robust risk management, transparency, and comparability across all portfolio components. Traditional benchmarks that reflect only public equities no longer fully describe how portfolios are positioned or how they actually perform.
MSCI’s new index emerges at this intersection. By using LP-sourced data and a systematic index methodology, it offers a standardized way to observe and compare performance across both public and private equity. This can help investors better understand:
- The contribution of private equity to total portfolio returns
- The interaction between public market volatility and private asset behavior
- The impact of strategic allocation shifts between public and private equity
For index-linked strategies, multi-asset products, and advisory solutions, the new benchmark may also support innovation in product design around “total equity” exposure.
Industry Impact
Who benefits:
- Asset Owners: Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments and insurers seeking a unified, policy-level benchmark that reflects both public and private equity allocations.
- Asset Managers: Firms offering multi-asset or private-market solutions that need a credible total equity benchmark for reporting and product positioning.
- Consultants & Advisors: Professionals tasked with performance attribution, risk analysis and strategic allocation recommendations across public and private assets.
Use cases:
- Reference benchmark for portfolios that blend listed and private equity
- Framework for total equity performance reporting
- Tool for analyzing how private equity affects overall risk/return characteristics
- Input for asset-liability management and long-term allocation modeling
By giving the market a common language for “total equity,” the index could influence how mandates are structured, how performance is evaluated, and how investors communicate with stakeholders about the role of private markets in their portfolios.
Market Context and Methodological Significance
The launch of the MSCI All Country Public + Private Equity Index also underscores the importance of robust data in private markets. The private equity component is powered by MSCI’s proprietary dataset of LP-sourced cash flows and valuations drawn from nearly 10,000 funds. This depth of information allows for a more representative and systematically modeled view of private equity returns than isolated fund-level snapshots.
Investors looking to integrate private assets into risk systems, scenario analysis tools, and strategic allocation models often face challenges due to data sparsity and reporting lags. A daily index anchored in consistent methodology offers a more practical and scalable solution for integration into existing workflows.
What Comes Next
This index is part of MSCI’s broader initiative to make private markets more measurable and comparable to their public counterparts. As investors deepen their exposure to private equity and other private asset classes, demand is likely to grow for benchmarks, analytics and risk tools that treat private assets as structural—rather than peripheral—portfolio components.
Future developments may include:
- Additional indices reflecting different target allocations to private equity
- Regional or strategy-specific variants focusing on particular segments of the private equity market
- Expanded toolkits that help investors integrate private equity benchmarks into asset allocation models, stress testing, and scenario analysis
As market structure continues to evolve and more economic activity remains in private form, indices like the MSCI All Country Public + Private Equity Index may become central to how global equity performance is defined, monitored, and communicated.
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