Private Capital Pulse (U.S., monthly)

## What this measures

A Palanor calculation: one monthly reading of how busy U.S. private capital is, from five counts in public SEC filings, each against its own record since March 2012. Components, equally weighted: Venture money raised (Form D) (capital.form_d.venture_amount_sold.us.monthly); First-time Form D issuers (capital.form_d.first_time_issuers.us.monthly); New venture and private equity funds (Form D) (capital.form_d.new_funds.vc_pe.monthly); IPO registrations (S-1 and F-1, SPACs left out) (ipo.us.registrations.monthly); Completed acquisitions reported on 8-K (deals.us.acquisitions_completed.monthly).

## Why it matters

Private markets have no public price. Their activity shows up in filings: companies notify the SEC when they sell shares privately, funds when they start raising, companies when they file to go public and when they complete an acquisition. Read together they say whether money is moving into private companies and out to public markets or buyers.

## How it is made

1. For each component, each month, the total of the latest three months is compared with the same three months a year earlier (percent change). The change, not the level, is ranked, because filing counts drift for reasons that have nothing to do with the cycle (fewer listed companies, inflation in dollar amounts). 2. Each change is a percentile of that component's own monthly record since March 2012, the first month every component has a year-on-year change. 3. The composite is the mean of the five percentiles. A month is published only when all five components have data; no component is ever filled in at the middle, so the reading never settles at 50 for want of data. 4. The mean is rescaled so 0 is the weakest month in the record (November 2022) and 100 the strongest (June 2021).

Because percentiles use the whole record, the history is re-expressed as each month is added. Before publishing, the history was replayed in real time, ranking each month only against the months before it (140 months from the fourth year on): the replay and the published composite correlate at 0.987, differ by 3.1 percentile points on average, and sit on the same side of the middle in 92.9% of months.

## How to read it

The series starts in March 2012 at 29.5. The latest reading, for September 2026, is 63.0. The high is 100.0 (June 2021) and the low 0.0 (November 2022). Above 50, the activity of the latest three months has grown faster than usual for its own record; below 50, slower. The latest month's component percentiles are stored with the reading.

## What it does not say

It is a composite signal built by Palanor, not an official statistic and not a Custom Index. It measures activity counts in filings, not prices, valuations or returns. The Form D parts arrive quarterly, about a month after a quarter ends, so the Pulse runs one to three months behind the IPO and 8-K counts. Palanor tested whether the Form D components or the Pulse lead IPO filings, IPOs priced, completed acquisitions, material agreements, SBIR awards or computer systems design employment, with the walk-forward rules of the Foresight lead lattice: none passed, so it is not offered as a leading indicator of those series.

## Source

Palanor calculation from SEC Form D data sets and EDGAR filing indexes (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; public domain): capital.form_d.* (Form D), ipo.us.registrations.monthly (EDGAR form indexes) and deals.us.acquisitions_completed.monthly (8-K Item 2.01).