PE investment seemed poised for a spike in 2013, but Pitchbook’s 3Q 2013 Private Equity Breakdown spells out how that hasn’t happened, at least so far this year.

“While public equity markets experienced strong gains throughout the first half of 2013, PE deal-making was at a lackluster pace in 2Q 2013, reaching a new quarterly low since the depths of the financial crisis,” Pitchbook reports. PE firms invested $71 billion across 318 deals in the second quarter, down from the 420 investments in 1Q 2013 and far off the 671 investments in 4Q 2012, where late-year activity saw $141 billion in investments.

Meantime, exits saw a “slight uptick” in the third quarter– 108 portfolio company exits totaling $17.1 billion–but that activity was still the second lowest quarterly total in the last three years.

The other day I met my son Will for a burger in Madison. Where to go but the Nitty Gritty, the bar and grill famous for its free birthday drinks (and for its longtime owner and chief greeter, Marsh Shapiro, who died late last year)? I arrived first, ordered a diet drink, and found that Will was still a few minutes away. So I hatched a plan that depended on a quick consultation with a conspirator.

Will arrived to find my diet drink had a balloon tied to it, and my name was on the greeter board.

Walter Simson-21!

(This is the board that the bartenders normally use to proclaim a lucky child’s entree into the adult world. I had arranged for a five-minute interval of youth.)

Will looks at the balloon, the board, and me. “What’s going on?” he asks. It’s a question I anticipated, and I gave the only possible answer.

Turning a quick profit is always music to an investor’s ear. But sometimes, patiently sitting through the entire symphony, so to speak, can result in a particularly satisfying ending. An investor’s proverbial “Ode to Joy” that requires waiting until the final movement of Beethoven’s 9^th.

Steve Vivian is an investor with a platform that puts a twist on the traditional PE stance, including relaxing the traditional timeframe for realizing profit.  With 15 years behind him in the world of private equity, Vivian recently launched Kestrel Capital Group with partner Bill Harlan.

PitchBook’s recent report on 3Q activity in the PE world provided a good news/bad news kind of experience.

First the good: exits and fundraising are two relatively bright spots for PE investors. While “capital exited slipped following a record-breaking 2Q…the 143 deals executed in 3Q 2012 (were) a slight improvement in line with the recent trend, according to the report.

Meantime, PE firms closed 28 funds with a total of $35 billion, the report stated. That figure was down slightly from the previous quarter, but “3Q still registered the third best fundraising total in the last three years,” according to PitchBook.

Venture capital firms invested $7.0 billion in 898 deals in the second quarter of 2012, rising above first-quarter levels of $6.0 billion and 809 deals. That’s according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based on data from Thomson Reuters.

Investments still lag last year’s overall pace. “If funding levels in the second half of the year remain consistent with the first half of the year, VC investing in 2012 will fall short of the nearly $30 billion invested in 2011 but will exceed the $23 billion invested in 2010,” according to Tracy T. Lefteroff, global managing partner of venture capital at PwC US.