Buyouts Paywall: How to Read Private Equity News for Free

Buyouts is the private-equity trade publication from PEI Group, the London and New York publisher behind Private Equity International and a stable of other finance titles. It covers fundraising, secondaries, deal flow and the people moves at buyout firms, and it is the place where news of a general partner failing to raise a new fund, or a mid-market firm quietly selling a portfolio company, tends to appear first. Its readers are fund managers, placement agents, lawyers and the limited partners who commit money to the industry, and the subscription is priced for them. This guide explains how its paywall works and how to read a story in full.

How the Buyouts paywall works

Buyouts uses a subscriber paywall. A non-subscriber opening a story sees the headline and the first paragraph or two before the text is replaced by a prompt to register or subscribe. Some briefer items and press-release style news are left open, but the reporting that makes the site worth reading, on fundraising trouble, fee disputes and secondary sales, is locked from the first visit. There is no monthly allowance to count down.

What matters for the reader is how that lock is applied. PEI's platform delivers the full article in the page so that search engines index every story, which is how a search for a fund name or a dealmaker finds the right piece. A script then checks for a subscriber session and hides the body if there is none. A crawler-style reader that never runs that script receives the complete article.

Our tests on 10 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• An 826-word Buyouts report on a mid-market firm deciding not to raise a new fund loaded in full, all 17 paragraphs.
• A 535-word Buyouts story on the same firm more than doubling the size of a wine distribution platform loaded in full, all 13 paragraphs.

Read a Buyouts article in full

• Copy the article link. Buyouts links look like buyoutsinsider.com/headline-slug/, sometimes with newsletter tracking parameters attached.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and body text.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. Buyouts' free daily email carries the headlines and the opening lines of each story, which is often enough to know whether a piece matters to you.
• Firm subscriptions. Most readers get access through an employer licence rather than a personal one; it is worth asking whether your firm already has one.
• Press releases. Fund closes and deal announcements are usually mirrored on the firms' own sites and on the wires within a day.
• Sister titles. Private Equity International and Venture Capital Journal, also PEI Group titles, run on the same platform and probably behave the same way, but we have not tested them.

Financial trade press compared

Buyouts sits alongside the other trade titles we have tested that gate in the browser. American Banker, Law.com and The Real Deal all load in full the same way. The big financial dailies are a different matter: the Financial Times and Bloomberg enforce their paywalls on the server and do not work. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out the difference, and the full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Buyouts is a specialist publication with a small reporting team, and subscriptions are what fund that reporting. If you work in private equity and read it most weeks, a subscription, personal or through your firm, is the right way to support it.