Why 90% of GPs Remain Unassessed and What That Costs Allocators
February 2026Public equities have decades of independent, repeatable coverage. Private markets do not. The estimated ten percent of GPs that receive formal third-party research captures the largest brand names, but leaves the rest of the market systematically underdiagnosed at the point of commitment.
Where the coverage gap comes from
Three structural factors explain the gap. First, the unit economics of bespoke consulting engagements do not scale below the largest allocators. Second, rating agency coverage in private markets is thin and concentrated in credit. Third, the datasets most allocators rely on are self-reported fund-level numbers that cannot support the decomposition needed to assess skill at the deal level.
The result is that for roughly ninety percent of GPs seeking commitments, independent assessment is either unavailable or procured only on an ad-hoc project basis. Allocators default to network heuristics and the availability bias of recent in-person meetings.
The cost to allocation outcomes
When assessment is uneven, capital concentrates around the GPs that happen to have coverage rather than the GPs that would deliver the best risk-adjusted outcomes. The secondary consequence is adverse selection: emerging and mid-size managers with genuine skill cannot cheaply demonstrate it, and the allocators best positioned to fund them lack the infrastructure to evaluate at scale.
Closing this gap requires moving fund rating from a bespoke, one-off exercise to a repeatable piece of infrastructure. That is the premise behind the QFT platform and the reason the underlying research programme was started in the first place.
