Ten years ago, most of the private-market funds on this page did not exist in a form an individual could buy.
Apollo, Blackstone, KKR, PIMCO, Ares, Carlyle, Hamilton Lane, Barings, Golub, Franklin Templeton, Macquarie, BlackRock, Neuberger Berman — these are the managers institutions and sovereign funds use, and their private funds came with commitments in the millions and a decade of your money locked away. That has genuinely changed. KKR's private markets fund asks $25,000. Nuveen Churchill and BlackRock's private credit funds ask $2,500. Apollo, Blackstone, Golub and HPS sit at $50,000, and Hamilton Lane's infrastructure fund starts at $20,000. Every one of those is open only to accredited or professional investors, so the qualification test rather than the cheque is the real threshold — only {ELIGR} of the funds here are authorised for sale to the retail public. {NMONTHLY} let you redeem monthly or more often and {NQUARTERLY} quarterly, where the old private-markets bargain was ten years and no exit at all. Subscribing is easier than redeeming in most of them — money often goes in monthly and comes back quarterly — so it is worth reading the two halves of a dealing line separately.
That is worth being genuinely pleased about, and it is why this page exists. But an open door is not the same as an easy walk. These are real institutional products with real terms, and reading them well is a skill — one that takes about twenty minutes to learn and then serves you for life. The rest of this page is that walk-through, using the funds in the table below as live examples.
Every fund, with what it returned, who sells it, who may buy it and what it costs to get in. Filtered by default to the {NMIN100} available at $100,000 or less. Click any name for its full record.
| Fund | Asset class | Bought through | Open to | Ann. return | Basis | Vol | Max DD | Minimum | Covers | Record |
|---|
{NACLASS} kinds of fund, ranked by median annualised return. The top two bars each rest on a single fund, so read them as an indication rather than a ranking.
Not a shortlist — these are simply the {NRETVOL} funds whose documents publish both figures, which are the only ones that can be drawn this way. They are ordered by return so you can see the volatility that came with it; each fund's pair covers its own period, so read the pairs rather than the order.
Volatility is the size of the typical year-to-year swing. A fund returning 10% a year with 3% volatility mostly lands between 7% and 13%. The same 10% with 25% volatility mostly lands between −15% and +35%. Identical average, completely different experience of owning it — which is why the two numbers are only worth reading together.
Holdings, concentration and sector mix as each document reports them — and how to tell whether a holdings count means spread or concentration.
What one "holding" is depends on what the fund buys.
Every fund publishes a holdings count, and it is the most useful single line about the portfolio once you know the unit behind it. Four units appear on this page.
So 20 is not automatically riskier than 295 — the two funds are built for different jobs. A small count of companies is a conviction portfolio; a large count of loans is an income portfolio designed to absorb a few defaults. The table below prints the count and the unit side by side, so you can see which job a fund is built for.
Where a document gives a sector split, the technology share is shown — {NTECH} funds do, from {TECHLO} to {TECHHI}, median {TECHMED}. Worth a glance against what you already hold, because technology can arrive through a fund that is not called a technology fund.
| Fund | Asset class | Holdings | Counting what | Top 10 | Largest | In tech | Beta | Public equity | Benchmark |
|---|
Most portfolios are one thing: listed shares, mostly American. Two questions tell you whether a fund adds anything new — does it own a different kind of asset, and does it invest in a different economy? The grid places every fund on both, so you can see which of the two you would actually be buying.
Start with your own holdings, not with the fund.
If what you hold is an S&P 500 tracker, a global equity fund, a Singapore unit trust or a handful of American shares, then you own listed securities, in the American economy. That is one corner of the grid, and a world index is roughly two-thirds American by value, so a "global" fund is usually a good deal of the same bet. It is a perfectly sound place to be — it is simply one place. Everything below is measured from it: the further a fund sits from that corner, the more it changes about your position rather than repeating it.
The two kinds do different jobs, so pick the one you actually want.
Private markets change the asset type and the rhythm. Private credit and private equity do not move with the stock market day to day, and that steadiness is a real benefit and much of why people hold them. What they do not necessarily change is the economy underneath: {NUSUNL} of the {NUS} US-centred funds here hold unlisted assets.
Both are genuine diversification, and the grid lets you pick. If you want a different rhythm, take the unlisted column. If you want a different economy, take the {NNONUS} funds in the "somewhere else" row. Knowing which of the two you are buying is the whole point of the map.
Seven habits that make any factsheet quick to read and easy to compare with the next one, plus three questions worth asking of every fund.
How every figure was extracted, and the two rules that govern it: nothing is computed, and every number is labelled by its basis.
Each document was put through five steps: classify what the file is; extract a fixed set of 34 fields, seventeen of which are the facts the Covers column scores; label the basis of every number; note anything a reader would want drawn to their attention; and compile. Nothing is sourced from outside the documents, nothing is estimated, and where a field is absent the record says so.
On the platform column. A fund is listed against a platform only where its document names that platform in a distributing role — as the issuer of the feeder vehicle, the named distributor or placement agent, the subscription route, or the branding on the document itself. Where a platform appears only in a recipient watermark, the fact is noted in grey but the platform is not named and not counted, because a watermark records who a document was released to rather than who may sell the fund. {NNOPLAT} name no platform at all.
On the eligibility column. Taken from the document's own audience statement or investor-eligibility term, not from disclaimer boilerplate — the sentence "not available to retail investors" is evidence against retail access, not for it. Where a document lists several tiers, the least restrictive one actually offered to is shown.
On "appraised" and "market-priced". Where a fund holds assets that do not trade, its NAV is an appraisal rather than a quoted price. That is not an informality: these documents name auditors including KPMG, Deloitte, BDO and Ernst & Young, describe independent third-party valuation firms engaged to support portfolio marks, and several operate a formal valuation designee reporting to a board of trustees. The label in this study distinguishes how a number is produced, not how trustworthy it is.
This is a study of disclosure, not of manager quality. A fund that discloses little may be excellent; a fund that discloses everything may be poor. The point is that the second can be assessed and the first cannot.