Beyond IQ — Top Performance in Private Capital
Welcome — and thank you for considering this study.
This research investigates what distinguishes top-performing investment professionals. Your participation contributes to one of the first large-scale studies applying psychometric methods to the Private Capital industry.
The study is conducted by Jan Veder, PhD Candidate at HSSH Schaffhausen (Switzerland), under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marcus Riekeberg.
Participate in the survey →~23 minutes
Reasoning tasks, self-assessment items, and questions about your career and performance.
Structurally anonymous
No name, email or IP address is stored with your response.
Independent & academic
Conducted solely as PhD research — no commercial profiling.
GDPR & revDSG
Processed under EU and Swiss data-protection law.
What it involves
Content: reasoning tasks measuring cognitive ability, self-assessment items on personality and emotional intelligence, and questions about your career and performance.
At the end: you will receive your personal score on a validated cognitive assessment — other results from the study can be discussed in a personal debrief.
As a thank you
As a participant you can optionally request:
- a confidential personal benchmark against the global reference sample,
- a 1:1 debrief conversation to discuss your individual results (please write down your personal code on the last page),
- a copy of the final study ahead of publication.
The aim is for 500 participants worldwide. Every participant counts. Thank you very much for your support. The preliminary results are planned to be introduced at a private equity research conference in late 2026.