Northern Trust has introduced new performance and analysis capabilities for clients investing in private equity, hedge funds and other alternative assets.

New features include an expanded range of resources and functions available online to meet the unique needs of alternative assets investors, and specialised tools to assist limited partners in administering private equity portfolios.

Northern Trust's online performance analysis tool, Fundamentals, now provides access to internal rate of return measures and on-the-fly analysis of the funding status and growth of private markets assets, including private equity and real assets.

Fundamentals also includes on-demand access to sophisticated metrics, which Northern Trust says more accurately portray hedge fund performance, such as skew-ness, kurtosis, maximum drawdown, upside variance, Sterling ratio and Calmar ratio.

Christopher Mullooly, product manager for investment risk and analytical services at Northern Trust, says: 'These accounting and performance measurements go beyond traditional mean-variance analysis, recognising the need to understand the often non-normally distributed return behaviour of private equity, hedge funds and real estate.' 

The enhanced core metric capabilities are available to all clients subscribing to Northern Trust's performance analysis service and are delivered via Passport, Northern Trust's online data platform.

Northern Trust has also strengthened the Private Monitor brand of private equity investor services with the deployment of Private i 5.0, by the Burgiss Group.

Clients can track and analyse performance and obtain ad hoc reports on various internal rate of return analyses, modified internal rate of return (under varied assumptions), funding and distribution ratios, and benchmark internal rate of return analysis.

In the Private Monitor suite, Northern also offers the Burgiss Group's browser-based application, Private Informant, a 'look-through' reporting of partnership company holdings.

Paul Finlayson, product manager for alternative asset services at Northern Trust, says: 'We will continue to evolve both our core and premium capabilities while partnering with the best in the industry, like the Burgiss Group. These innovations, coupled with our unique data capture and consultative experience, will help our clients efficiently manage the time and resources they must dedicate to meet their risk management responsibilities required to properly oversee these investments.'