Trust band: narrow. My probability that the strict delimitation of venture capital performance is absolute is 30%, because important strategic considerations are not captured by random benchmarks.
I believe that studies comparing empirical portfolios to random references overestimate the role of chance by ignoring the deep motivations of investments, especially for sovereign funds.
An investment in a company like ASML, for example, can have a geopolitical strategic value to secure access to cutting-edge technologies, well beyond its relative financial performance to a random portfolio, making the assessment of managerial competence more complex than simple return comparison.