The morning after SIPA Day 2026, SIPA and EDHEC are convening six to eight pension plans for an open conversation on the Total Portfolio Approach and benchmarking with private assets. The aim is to understand the issues North American plans run into when integrating private assets in the total portfolio, and to steer new research at EDHEC and new product development at SIPA towards those needs.
Registration is open to asset owners (LPs) only. Places are limited and confirmed personally by email.
A Total Portfolio Approach manages risk by factor exposure, not asset-class buckets — but private equity and infrastructure are hard to fit in. Appraisal-based valuations smooth away real volatility, and allocation weights don't tell you what factor exposure you actually hold. SIPA's monthly, mark-to-market indices close that gap.
The Challenge
TPA investors size positions by exposure to systematic risk factors — equity, rates, credit — across the whole fund. Private markets don't offer the continuous pricing that requires: appraisal-based valuations understate volatility, and a private equity allocation's beta to public equities isn't fixed — it ran above 1.0 through the low-rate 2014–2021 period and has sat below 1.0 since 2022. Without independently repriced data, private allocations sit outside the risk budget entirely.
The SIPA Approach
privateMetrics® and infraMetrics® reprice monthly on a mark-to-market basis — giving TPA teams the same data granularity for private holdings as for listed markets. Our four-part research series sets out how to put that to work.
PART I · MEASURE
Introduces the toolkit for mapping private equity and infrastructure holdings onto systematic risk factors using privateMetrics® and infraMetrics® — turning private allocations into numbers a TPA framework can use.
Download Part IPART II · GOVERN
Shows how a simple listed equities-and-bonds reference portfolio turns private holdings into consistent risk budgets, separating skill-driven active returns from market-driven passive ones.
Download Part IIPART III · MONITOR
Tracks how private equity's beta to public equities has shifted over time, showing why exposures need active monitoring against listed proxies — not a static allocation weight.
Download Part IIIPART IV · ALLOCATE
Puts it together in a worked portfolio: adding private assets to a factor-targeted allocation lifts the Sharpe ratio from 0.55 to 0.67, since private markets carry exposure listed proxies can't fully replicate.
Download Part IVBring private assets into
your TPA framework
Our team can walk through factor mapping and reference portfolio design for your private allocations.