In our new film for FTSE 250 HVPE, Julia Hanmer provides an overview of its Quantitative Investment Science division, explaining how advanced data science, decades of private markets data and quantitative modelling are used to strengthen portfolio construction, risk management and long term returns for shareholders.

Julia works with Harbourvest, the Investment Manager for HVPE.

Harbourvest treat Quantitative Investment Science as a dedicated, data driven investment function whose job is to help HarbourVest’s investment teams, its underlying GPs and clients such as HVPE make better decisions in private markets. They sit on more than forty years of HarbourVest deal and company data, covering over 68,000 underlying holdings and 35,000 funds, with a team of 29 specialists and an average of 16 years’ experience.  In the video, Julia describes this as a deep data warehouse that is constantly being mined and refreshed, not a static archive.

What makes it interesting is how that data is actually used. The QIS group builds quantitative models and web based tools that sit alongside fundamental judgement, rather than trying to replace it. Using machine learning, artificial intelligence and some fairly serious data engineering, they look at everything from deal pricing and performance attribution to industry analytics and portfolio construction.  The same toolkit underpins HarbourVest’s own private equity benchmarks, which track how buyout and venture backed companies are really performing beneath the surface of the listed indices.  For a listed trust like HVPE, that means the portfolio is being steered with a much clearer view of where risk and return are actually coming from.

Julia uses that framework to go back to the basic question a wealth manager has to answer for any client. Why have private equity exposure at all? The starting point is long term performance. Across multiple cycles, diversified private equity has tended to outperform public equities, although the size of that premium obviously moves around through time. 

The second lens is risk, which is where the data gets interesting. In the global financial crisis, public markets fell sharply and visibly. Private equity valuations also moved, but the drawdowns were typically smaller and less violent, particularly in diversified buyout portfolios. It reflects the way deals are structured, the type of companies targeted and the absence of forced selling. For an adviser thinking about client outcomes, the point Julia makes is that private equity can provide a measure of downside mitigation inside a broader equity allocation, provided you access it through a properly diversified vehicle.

Then there is the question of timing. “Why now” is something every client asks, and QIS attacks it with data rather than stories. Today, private market valuations in many parts of the opportunity set look more attractive than their public equivalents, after a period of reset. At the same time, dispersion between the best and worst managers has widened, which means manager selection and portfolio construction matter more, not less. QIS is effectively scanning that landscape using the full HarbourVest dataset, highlighting where risk adjusted opportunities are emerging and where caution is warranted.

For HVPE, all of this sits behind the simple FTSE 250 ticker on a client’s platform. The trust gives listed access to a globally diversified HarbourVest portfolio, while the QIS team works in the background to refine allocation, monitor risk and test the investment case for private equity through different cycles. For wealth managers, the attraction is that you are not just buying a pool of funds, you are plugging into a manager that has spent decades building the data, tools and people needed to make sense of an increasingly complex private markets universe.