Quantifying style drift

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An upcoming PitchBook analyst note takes a look at GP style drift. It’s an important topic but a frustrating one for LPs. Quantifying the drift is tricky. Our framework assigns style scores to the PE firms themselves over time, instead of at the fund level. We broke the style definitions into three broad categories—generalists, specialists, and “targeted”, which is something of a middle-ground between the two extremes. The time element is staggered, with overlapping ten-year buckets that show the gradual drifts over time.