Private equity funds generally refer to funds engaged in private equity (non-listed company equity) investment. Private placement is relative to public offering. At present, all funds in China are raised through public offering, which is called fund public offering. If a fund does not go through public offering, but privately raises funds from a specific target, it is called a private equity fund. Funds have two legal structures. One is a legal person, each fund holder is a shareholder of the investment company, and the manager is also one of the shareholders. The other is contractual, and the relationship between the holder and the manager is contractual, not equity. At present, public offering funds are all contractual, but at present, China's laws only allow public offering funds to raise funds by contract. Therefore, if you want to set up a private equity fund, you must adopt the way of equity, so there are legal obstacles. Private equity funds that invest in the securities market are called private equity funds, and only those that invest in the equity of unlisted companies can be called PE- private equity funds. Private equity funds can be divided into public offering and private offering, or public offering and private offering according to the different ways of issuing securities and whether to issue securities to unspecified public. As a collective investment system managed by experts, funds have dozens of different perspectives in foreign countries, which are divided into contractual funds and corporate funds according to organizational forms. According to the way of establishment, there are closed-end funds and open-end funds; According to the investment objects, there are stock funds, money market funds, option funds and real estate funds. However, through the names of these funds, the English word "privately offered fund" which combines "private placement" and "fund" can no longer be found in official documents. Recently, in our country, the "private fund" or "underground fund" often mentioned in the financial market is a kind of collective investment directed at private placement by specific investors, which is compared with the securities investment fund supervised by the competent department of our government and publicly issuing beneficiary certificates to unspecified investors. There are basically two ways, one is a contractual collective investment fund based on signing the entrusted investment contract, and the other is a corporate collective investment fund based on * * * contributing shares to establish a joint-stock company.