Angel investors invest billions of dollars in thousands of fledgling companies every year,
thereby acting as informal venture capitalists. What returns can these angels expect to
receive on their investments? Although previous work has explored realised returns, this
paper is the first to provide estimates of expected returns on angel investments in a form
comparable to reported expected returns on stock or venture capital.
Until recently, research on the returns to investments by angel investors and angel
groups has been limited because suitable large data sets have not been available.
The Angel Investor Performance Project (AIPP) recently has provided an informative
database on comparable angel investments. These data have 588 investments of which
419 have been exited.
We use these data to explore the expected returns on angel investments. Our paper is
similar in spirit to Cochrane (2005) and Korteweg and Sorenson (2010) who estimate
the expected returns on venture capital investments and to Barnhart and Dwyer (2012)
who estimate the returns on traded stock in new industries. It differs from the prior work
on returns to angel investment byWiltbank (2005) because we estimate expected returns
per investment per year rather than realised returns per investment. Thus, our paper
combines these strands of literature by estimating expected returns on angel investments.
The distinction between realised internal rates of return and expected returns is critical.
Realised internal rates of return do not drive financial decisions. Expected returns drive
financial decisions.
Our results indicate that the expected return on angel investments is the same order of
magnitude as Cochrane’s (2005) estimate of returns to venture capital and higher than
Korteweg and Sorenson’s (2010) estimate. The expected return estimated from the AIPP
is about 70% per year. This expected return reflects a much higher variance than returns
on traded stock and a few extraordinary payoffs.