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Welcome to AltAssets.net

Editorial: Thank you for visiting our new site. What are we all about? And what will you find here?

European private equity is coming of age. Since its birth in the seventies and eighties, the private equity market in Europe has usually been considered as the less mature - and less responsible - sibling of other, more mainstream asset classes. But, as the market has grown up, European governments and institutions have started taking private equity more seriously. Many now see the market as a driving force in creating entrepreneurial economies.

There's no shortage of evidence to back this up. In the UK, Paul Myners' review of institutional investment practices, commissioned by the government, gave a wake-up call to pension funds and other institutions to start at least looking at private equity as an asset class. In Germany, wide-ranging tax reforms are creating a more friendly environment for investing in private equity. Italy has just got its first fund of funds, signalling an increasing maturity in the Italian market. And, with an ageing population and a shrinking work force, pension reform is firmly on the EU's agenda and is likely to inject up to €5,000bn of extra capital into the European markets - a portion of which will undoubtedly flow into the hands of an increasingly professional private equity industry.

These developments and others have created a huge thirst among investors for information on private equity. And it's not been easy to find - until now. The private equity industry has been operating for years in a vacuum of information. This hasn't done it any good. Myners even highlighted this as one of the main barriers to investing in the asset class.

This is the background against which we are launching our AltAssets web site. Run by private equity news and research firm Almeida Capital, AltAssets is a community and information site for institutions that invest in private equity, the funds that they invest in and professional service providers. We want to equip our visitors with the news, views and research they need to make informed decisions.

In the NewsZone, you'll find stories covering all the latest private equity news, longer length features and opinion pieces analysing key industry trends, plus our roundup of the previous month's main stories - our visitors need never miss an important development again.

In the Knowledge Bank, you'll discover a library of information on private equity from some of the world's most authoritative sources. Our site showcases material from leading law and accountancy firms, institutional investors, private equity firms, investment consultants and academics. This area of our site contains information for visitors of every level of understanding. In Learning Curve, we've gathered and written articles that explain some of the most fundamental points and issues in private equity. Leading Edge caters for visitors at the other end of the spectrum, with contributions from a selection of the industry's top-flight thinkers.

We've also included an area of the site that allows visitors to ask experts questions on any private equity subject they'd like the answer to. It's also an area for visitors to give us the feedback that's so essential to ensuring that the site is 100 per cent relevant to their needs. It's called Forum and you'll find it in the Knowledge Bank section of the site.

What you're seeing now is just the beginning. It's the first version of a site that will develop much more. We'll be launching new services and products, including the Fund Market, in the coming months. We'll keep you posted.

We're also on the look-out for more content, so if you or your organisation has any articles that you'd like us to consider posting on the site, we'd like to hear from you. Please e-mail your articles or ideas to editorial@altassets.net

We've enjoyed putting together a site that we feel brings together a wealth of private equity material from some of the world's leading experts. We hope you like it.