Webinar Recap: Closing the Private Market Visibility Gap – Nowcasting Daily NAV Indexes and Loan-Level Insights

Private markets have long operated on a significant lag. By the time quarterly fund performance reaches an investor’s desk, the data is often three months old, and that gap is increasingly difficult to justify as the asset class scales and expectations evolve. In a recent joint webinar, Rimes and MSCI explored how that gap is closing and what the next generation of private market data infrastructure looks like. 

The session, moderated by Patrick Walsh, Head of Foundational Data at Rimes, featured Ryan Powers from MSCI’s private asset index product team and Jason Amoratis from MSCI’s Research and Development department. Together, they walked through two complementary innovations: nowcasting daily NAV indexes and loan-level private capital holdings indexes. 

The Problem with Quarterly Reporting 

A live poll during the session captured the current reality: roughly half of attendees wait for quarterly GP reports with no interim view, while the other half relies on some form of internal model or estimation. Both approaches carry trade-offs, and neither reflects what institutional investors increasingly demand. 

As Ryan Powers of MSCI noted, “Quarterly closed-end fund indexes have had their place in the space for quite some time. They’re no longer sufficient. There are greater demands for intra-quarter transparency, more sophisticated risk modelling, and tougher questions being asked.” 

Rimes, which processes over 4.5 million indices and benchmarks every day, sits at the center of that shift. As private market data grows in complexity and frequency, a trusted data management and distribution layer becomes as important as the index methodology itself. 

Nowcasting: A Daily View of Private Market Performance 

Nowcasting solves for the blackout period between quarterly reports by generating daily NAV estimates using the best available information at any point in time. The approach blends an econometric model anchored to the historical behavior of the index being nowcast, a public market proxy weighted to the country and sector composition of the underlying index, and real-time GP-reported NAVs as they arrive during the quarter. 

Early in a quarter, the model leans on the public market proxy. As GP valuations trickle in, it reweights toward actual reported data. Jason Amoratis described it simply: “We move from what we thought the market would do to what it’s actually doing.” Over the last ten quarters, the nowcasting index has come within 1% of the actual closed-end fund index return, even through periods of market stress. 

For Rimes clients, this means daily private market data that is governed, validated, and integrated alongside their broader index and benchmark data, without the overhead of building that pipeline internally. 

Loan-Level Indexes: Getting Below the Surface 

Fund-level IRRs and multiples tell you what returns were delivered, but not what drove them. Loan-level private capital holdings indexes go one level deeper, providing gross-of-fees, gross-of-leverage performance at the asset level, segmented by sector, geography, strategy, and borrower size. 

For private credit, the framework offers two lenses: holdings indexes that capture the full economic exposure of underlying portfolio companies, and direct lending loan indexes that isolate pure debt instruments across different lending verticals. Together, they help investors understand concentration risk, benchmark direct lenders at the asset level, and identify performance drivers across market segments. 

Rimes’ role is to make sure clients can operationalize innovations like these, ingesting, governing, and distributing data of this complexity at the scale and reliability the industry requires. 

Explore What This Means for Your Organization 

Rimes is offering a 45-day trial so you can see how these capabilities fit into your existing data environment. To learn more, contact the Rimes team today.