Performance Metrics
What is Vintage Year?
A fund’s vintage year is the year it makes its first investment (or holds its first close). Vintage year is used to compare funds raised in similar market conditions.
The vintage year anchors a fund to a point in the market cycle, which heavily influences its returns. LPs benchmark a fund against peers of the same vintage, because funds investing in, say, 2009 faced very different conditions than those investing in 2021.
Diversifying commitments across vintage years is a core LP portfolio-construction technique for smoothing returns.