Preqin: private-capital and hedge-fund data (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

Preqin is a licensed commercial dataset (Preqin, now part of BlackRock), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no Preqin credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

Preqin is a private-capital and hedge-fund database. It covers private equity, venture capital, private debt, real estate, and infrastructure funds, plus hedge funds, with fund sizes, vintages, strategies, net returns and cash flows (for performance and PME work), and limited-partner (LP) commitment records that map institutions to the funds they back. It is used in, for example Siriwardane, Sunderam & Wallen for hedge-fund returns and a fixed-income-arbitrage strategy flag, Chen & Ewens for LP commitment data in a home-bias robustness test, and Johnston-Ross, Ma & Puri for PE fund size, vintage, and first-time-fund indicators.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: Preqin (acquired by BlackRock).
• Coverage: private-capital and hedge funds globally, with fund, performance, LP, and deal modules; depth varies by strategy and region.

Access (when licensed)

• Direct from Preqin. Through the Preqin Pro platform, data exports, or an API, keyed on Preqin fund and firm identifiers.
• Possibly via a library or vendor feed. Some institutions reach Preqin through bundled products; availability is not confirmed here, so check with your library before assuming a given path.
• Credentials are required either way. Keep them in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Reporting is voluntary and partly FOIA-sourced, so selection bias is structural. Fund performance comes from manager submissions and from freedom-of-information disclosures by public pension LPs. Funds that report, and the LPs subject to disclosure, are not a random sample; survivorship and backfill bias both apply, especially to hedge-fund returns.
• The fund universe is incomplete and overlaps imperfectly with peers. Coverage differs from PitchBook, Burgiss, and Cambridge Associates; the same fund can carry different sizes or returns across vendors. Decide on one source of truth per field and document discrepancies.
• LP commitment data is partial. Commitment records are strongest where public LPs must disclose; private LP commitments are thinly covered. Do not treat the LP map as the full investor base of a fund.
• Net versus gross, and PME conventions, must be stated. Returns are usually net of fees, but fee treatment and the public-market-equivalent benchmark choice drive the numbers. State the return basis and PME convention explicitly.
• History gets restated. Funds and performance are added and revised retroactively as managers report; a current pull is not what was known at an earlier date. Pin the data vintage and re-pull deliberately.
• Entity mapping is its own step. Join on Preqin fund and firm identifiers and confirm the manager, fund-family, and portfolio-company mapping before merging with other sources.

Citation

Cite the product and vendor, e.g.: Preqin private-capital data, Preqin; data licensed and accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the data vintage, the module (fund, performance, LP, or deal), the return basis, and any PME convention used.