Vintage Year
Private Credit glossary · Fund Structures, Returns & Economics
Definition
Year of a fund's first closing; used for performance benchmarking.
Vintage Year in plain English
A fund's vintage year is simply the year it first collected money from investors and started operating — its official starting line. Investors care because it lets them compare apples to apples: a fund launched in a boom year faced totally different conditions than one launched in a crash, so you judge each against other funds born the same year. It's like comparing runners by which race they entered — you'd never fault a sprinter for "losing" to someone who ran on a different, faster track on a different day. The vintage year sets the fair baseline for grading performance.
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