This report introduces a new, market-based framework for benchmarking private asset funds and evaluating their managers’ ability to generate “alpha,” or outperformance. This has historically been difficult due to a lack of appropriate benchmarks, a gap now filled by Scientific Infra & Private Assets (SIPA). SIPA’s indices are not proxies but are built using an asset pricing model calibrated with observable private market transaction prices, allowing them to accurately represent average market performance. The robustness of this approach is confirmed by findings that the average private fund shows zero outperformance when measured against these indices, which aligns with academic research on active management in other asset classes. Building on this ability to accurately measure alpha at the fund level, the report addresses whether high performance is the result of consistent skill or just random luck. It presents a novel fund manager rating framework designed specifically to estimate a manager’s skill, defined as their ability to repeatedly beat the market. By combining the measurement of how much alpha a manager generates with this new estimate of their skill in doing so consistently, the framework provides investors with a comprehensive set of metrics to improve fund manager selection.