Scientific Infra & Private Assets (SIPA), the leading private market index provider, has announced that its flagship private2000 index has been officially registered with the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) under Article 32 of the European Union’s Benchmarks Regulation (BMR).

The private2000 index tracks the aggregate performance of 2,000 private (unlisted) constituents in 30 countries that are drawn from a broader universe of 1M+ private assets curated by SIPA. As of December 31st, 2024, the private2000 had a market capitalisation of USD2.1tr, 10-year annualised returns of 15% (index EBITDA multiple: 14.3x), and a Sharpe ratio of 0.7.

Unlike the fund manager benchmarks that investors are used to, privateMetrics market indices are calculated monthly at the asset level. They are designed to track the risk and return characteristics of private equities as an asset class to represent the market in which private fund managers invest like any active manager.

As a registered benchmark, the private2000 can be used by supervised entities in the EU such as investment firms and banks, for various purposes, including determining the performance of investment funds, underlying financial instruments or financial contracts and measuring the performance of investment funds.

As such the private2000 is administered to meet the requirements of the EU BMR, including that the benchmark is designed, produced, and calculated in a way that ensures its accuracy and integrity and the existence of robust governance arrangements and internal controls to manage conflicts of interest and ensure the benchmark’s reliability.

Commenting on the registration of the private2000 index with ESMA, Frederic Blanc-Brude, CEO of Scientific Infra & Private Assets, said, “This demonstrates our commitment to our new private market index series. One of the most powerful use cases of this index is the measurement of private asset fund alpha against the broad private equities market. We believe that this application will change the way LPs evaluate and select managers and having our main private equities market index recognised by ESMA validates the efforts SIPA has put into creating a high quality and high reliability index for investors in private markets.”