A Yale School of Management study asks what search fund investors actually earn once you look past the pooled fund-level averages.
- Study by A.J. Wasserstein and colleagues at the Yale School of Management
- Looks at actual investor-level results: 1,192 deal-level observations from 12 real LP investors across 23 funds
- Headline finding: weighted-average MOIC across real portfolios is roughly 2.5x — well below the ~4.5x aggregate figure often cited from Stanford’s data
- Why the gap: no single investor gets into every deal, so a real portfolio can miss the rare 10x-plus outlier wins that drive pooled averages up
- Takeaway for LPs: expect closer to a 2x–3x MOIC (roughly 15%–25% IRR) over a typical five-year hold, rather than the higher headline numbers