That’s not a small move. It’s the sharpest single-period reversal in a market that had otherwise been remarkably stable in its mix.

Four years of the same story, then a break

Look at the annual mix going back to 2022 and the pattern is obvious: LP-led always wins, GP-led is stuck, and preferred equity is a rounding error that keeps shrinking.

For four straight years, GP-led was pinned at 41–42% of volume — a share so stable it looked structural. It took one half-year to move that number four points, to parity with LP-led, which itself gave up nine points from its FY 2025 peak. Preferred equity did something just as striking in the opposite direction: after shrinking from 10% to just 5% of volume between 2022 and FY 2025, it snapped back to 10% in 1H 2026 — doubling in two quarters.

Why parity, and why now

CL frames the GP-led side of this as continuation vehicles becoming a genuine liquidity and strategic fundraising tool across private markets, not a PE-only mechanism (infrastructure GP-led volume alone went from 6% to 15% of the GP-led mix in a year). On the LP-led side, the report notes the secondary fundraising boom is “coming full circle,” with maturing secondary funds themselves increasingly becoming the assets sold in LP-led trades — a self-reinforcing loop that didn’t really exist at this scale before.

The preferred equity rebound points to the same underlying shift: GPs reaching for structured solutions: net asset value loans, preferred equity, hybrid structures, as a working part of the liquidity toolkit rather than a niche product used only when a straight sale or CV won’t work.

The supporting evidence: buyers are following the sellers

Parity isn’t happening in isolation. Two other data points in the same report point the same direction, toward a market broadening out rather than just growing bigger.

• The buyer base is deconcentrating. It took only 14 buyers to account for 70% of total volume in both FY 2025 and FY 2024. In 1H 2026, the same 70% share required 19 buyers, a meaningful loosening of a market that had been getting more concentrated, not less.

• GPs are bringing their best assets to market on their own terms. Single-asset continuation vehicles (SACVs) recaptured share from multi-asset structures, running at 62% of GP-led volume in 1H 2026 versus 48% in FY 2025, a sign that sponsors increasingly see CVs as a precision tool for a specific trophy asset, not a bundle-and-sell mechanism.

Put together: more buyers, more GPs using CVs deliberately rather than opportunistically, and a structured-solutions layer that’s growing again after years of shrinking. Parity between LP-led and GP-led looks less like a coincidence of one unusual half-year and more like the natural result of a market where both sides of the table are now equally fluent in using secondaries.

Some Thoughts

The number that will get quoted from this report is $120bn, or the $250bn full-year forecast. The number that actually changes the narrative is 45/45. Volume records happen most years now, that’s been true since 2022’s 24% CAGR started compounding. Parity has happened zero times before this one.

Worth watching into 2H 2026 and FY 2026 close: whether the 45/45 split holds as a new normal or whether FY 2025’s LP-led-heavy mix reasserts itself once full-year numbers are in, and whether preferred equity’s rebound to 10% is durable or a one-half spike.

Data and figures in this article are drawn from Campbell Lutyens’ 1H 2026 Secondary Market Flash Report, based on survey responses from 120+ active market participants. CL notes the report is a preliminary marketing communication and has not conducted an official or recognized poll; its full report follows in the coming weeks. Analysis and framing above are Secondary Scoop’s own.

Strip away the RIA-consolidation headline and what’s left is a straightforward sponsor-to-sponsor sale: the original meaning of “secondary” in private equity, before the term got absorbed by fund-stake trading. TA and Onex bought Wealth Enhancement from Lightyear Capital in 2019; Onex stepped up to an equal-partner equity stake alongside TA in 2021. Seven years and, per the FT, at least six additional RIA tuck-ins in the past year alone later, the co-owners have hired Evercore and put the platform up for a full exit rather than a partial one.

That’s the detail worth sitting with. Nothing about Wealth Enhancement’s profile, recurring advisory fees, a sticky HNW client base, a proven buy-and-build playbook, reads like a forced sale. It reads like exactly the kind of asset GPs elsewhere have been rolling into single-asset continuation vehicles specifically so they don’t have to sell it.

Why now, and why these two buyers

The FT frames this within a broader wave: Mubadala Capital’s take-private of CI Financial, CD&R’s 2023 buyout of Focus Financial Partners, Advent’s minority check into Fisher Investments, TPG’s investment in Creative Planning. Recurring, fee-based revenue is the draw across all of them, the kind of cash flow that underwrites leverage and survives a choppy fundraising market for the sponsors themselves.

Carlyle and Bain are reportedly the final two bidders after a process that has been running for months. Both firms declined to comment to the FT; Wealth Enhancement, TA, Onex and Evercore did not respond to requests for comment. The FT’s sourcing is careful to note the deal is not done — the sale is at an advanced stage, but TA and Onex could still choose to hold.

“Some private equity executives have worried that the industry is overinvested in the wealth management space, with some of the industry’s longer-held investments failing to deliver the returns expected.” says the FINANCIAL TIMES.

That caveat matters for how this deal should be read across the secondaries market. Wealth management roll-ups were, until recently, treated as close to all-weather assets; the RIA-consolidation trade was the trade for PE. The FT’s reporting on softening sentiment (LPL Financial’s public-market valuation sliding this year, unease about AI’s effect on fee-based advice) suggests some of that conviction is fraying at the edges, even as the largest platforms keep changing hands at record multiples.

The secondaries angle that matters

For LPs and GPs watching the secondaries market specifically, the tell isn’t the price. It’s the structure. A $7bn sponsor-to-sponsor auction, run by an investment bank, with two full-scale buyout shops bidding to take the whole thing, is a vote that TA and Onex want liquidity and certainty over continued upside participation. Set beside the parallel trend of GPs using continuation vehicles to hold onto their best-performing, most cash-generative assets, this sale is a useful data point on where sponsors currently draw that line, and on how much confidence remains in wealth management as a category, three years into its consolidation wave.

EXTRA THOUGHTS ON SPONSOR-TO-SPONSOR BUYOUT

The instinct in secondaries coverage is to look for CVs and LP portfolio sales and call everything else “just M&A.” But a sponsor-to-sponsor buyout of this size, in a sector this actively being restructured through continuation vehicles elsewhere, belongs in the same conversation. The interesting question isn’t whether Carlyle or Bain wins; it’s why TA and Onex decided a full sale, rather than a CV, was the better way to monetize an asset that, by every account, is still compounding. That’s a governance and conviction question as much as a pricing one, and it’s worth watching what price it clears at relative to the CV comps quietly being marked elsewhere in wealth management.

_{Reporting: Antoine Gara and Oliver Barnes, Financial Times, “Carlyle and Bain Capital battle to buy wealth manager in potential $7bn deal.” Additional ownership-history sourcing: TA Associates, Onex, and Wealth Enhancement Group public disclosures. Read the original FT reporting via the link above.}

SP10 is no longer just “another fund.” It’s an earnings driver.

Strategic Partners X launched its investment period in March 2026. By June 30, three months later, it had already pulled in $11.0 billion of committed capital, with $8.6 billion still uncalled. Secondaries inflows for the quarter totaled $5.7 billion, and Blackstone says the bulk of that came from SP10 alone.

For context: its predecessor, Strategic Partners IX, took from October 2021 to March 2026, the better part of five years, to reach $19.7 billion in lifetime commitments. SP10 is on pace to get there in a fraction of the time.

What matters more than the pace is how management is talking about it. On the call, CFO Michael Chae listed SP10 alongside the Corporate Private Equity Asia III fund and the firm’s energy transition vehicle as one of three specific drawdown activations underpinning Blackstone’s guidance for double-digit management fee growth in 2027. That’s a notable shift: secondaries fundraising isn’t being framed as a nice-to-have diversification line, it’s one of three named pillars of the firm’s forward fee story.

The DPI drought, admitted on the record.

During the Q&A, Blackstone essentially narrated the exact conditions that drive LP-led and GP-led secondary activity.

Asked about the sluggish M&A recovery, Jon Gray broke the portfolio into three buckets: AI-adjacent infrastructure and energy names (where “bids are strong, pricing is good”), AI-unaffected consumer businesses (still liquid, if less frothy), and “white-collar services, professional information services, enterprise software.” On that last bucket, Gray didn’t hedge: “That’s where you’ve seen less liquidity. That’s where you’re seeing a part of the private equity market where you won’t see a ton of DPI. And I think that’s going to be there for a while.”

Earlier in the same Q&A block, on realizations timing more broadly, management drew a direct historical parallel to the aftermath of the 2008-09 crisis, when “the engine didn’t really ramp back up” until 2013, implying this cycle’s distribution recovery has been running on a similarly long fuse since 2022. Net Accrued Performance Revenues did hit a four-year high in the quarter, and management pointed to IPO reopening and public NAV growth inside the corporate PE book as reasons realizations should accelerate into Q4 and 2027. But the caveat attached to nearly every answer was the same: it’s uneven, it’s sector-specific, and GPs are choosing their moment rather than forcing distributions.

That combination, a large swath of the PE book explicitly flagged as DPI-starved for “a while,” against a backdrop where the largest alternative asset manager in the world is still being cautious about timing its own exits, is precisely the setup that pushes LPs toward secondary sales and sponsors toward continuation vehicles. Blackstone wasn’t pitching secondaries on this call. It didn’t need to; it was describing the problem secondaries exist to solve.

The track record behind the pitch.

For LPs sizing up SP10 against the platform’s history, the numbers Blackstone discloses on its full Strategic Partners lineage are worth having on hand: $83.4 billion in lifetime committed capital across eleven vehicles, $82.5 billion of total investment value realized and unrealized combined, a 1.6x total MOIC, and a 14% net IRR since inception. Secondaries as a reported strategy (which Blackstone defines as Strategic Partners only, excluding GP Stakes) appreciated a modest 1.7% in the quarter and 8.1% over the trailing twelve months — well behind the 7.2%/28.6% posted by infrastructure or the 3.7%/14.4% from corporate PE, but also the steadiest, least volatile number on the page in a quarter otherwise dominated by AI-driven markups.

Worth watching separately: GP Stakes.

Blackstone continues to report its GP Stakes strategy (BXGP) apart from Strategic Partners, even though both sit under the firm’s broader “Secondaries” umbrella in its AUM disclosures. BXGP, minority stakes in the management companies of PE and other alternative managers, stood at $13.1 billion in AUM as of quarter-end. It’s a reminder that as more large managers roll GP stakes and LP/GP-led secondaries into one reporting bucket, the line between “secondaries” and “stakes in secondaries managers” is going to keep blurring in how this market gets measured.

The bottom line.

Nobody on Blackstone’s call said the word “liquidity crunch.” They didn’t have to. Between SP10’s fundraising velocity, its new status as a named driver of 2027 fee guidance, and management’s own admission that swaths of the buyout market won’t produce distributions “for a while,” the largest alternative asset manager on earth just gave the secondaries market its best unpaid advertisement of the quarter.

From surplus to just-in-time capital

For most of the secondary market’s history, the defining feature of buyer capital was its abundance relative to opportunity. Dry powder sat as a static pool, built up over successive fundraising cycles, waiting to be deployed. Evercore’s data shows that dynamic breaking down. At 1.0x overhang, available capital roughly matches one year of volume, enough to sustain today’s pace, but with almost no slack if fundraising falters or deal flow accelerates further. The report is explicit that the $154 billion H2 fundraising target isn’t an ambitious stretch goal; it’s the amount required just to keep the market moving at its current speed.

A “record” quarter of GP-led supply is not simply evidence of a booming, capital-rich market, it is evidence of a market converting capital into deals faster than it is being replenished. The implication cuts both ways. For LPs and family offices allocating to secondary funds, it argues for urgency: capacity is genuinely scarcer than headline dry powder figures suggest, and access to top-tier managers matters more when the buyer base isn’t sitting on excess reserves. For GPs and sellers, it argues the opposite: a tightening capital base gives well-positioned buyers, particularly the roughly ten firms holding the bulk of dedicated capacity, real pricing leverage on anything short of best-in-class.

Where the slack is actually coming from

The market isn’t relying on dedicated secondary funds alone to fill that gap, and this is where the report’s other threads connect back to the capital story. Evergreen vehicles have gone from a niche product to mainstream infrastructure: 53% of buyers now operate one, and secondary-focused evergreen AUM has reached roughly $130 billion, with $11 billion of expected inflows over the next twelve months earmarked specifically for secondaries. These vehicles don’t replace flagship fundraising, they typically finance only a minority of any purchase price, but they smooth the cycle, giving buyers capital in hand between traditional raises exactly when a 1.0x overhang leaves no room for a pause.

Credit and infrastructure secondaries are doing something similar from a different angle: they’re expanding the total addressable pool of dedicated capital rather than recycling the existing one. Credit secondary deal value hit $20 billion in H1 alone, already surpassing all of 2025, with $31 billion of dry powder and 90%+ of buyers planning to raise more within a year. Infrastructure volume rose 33% to $12 billion, backed by $22 billion in dry powder that’s up 10% year-to-date even as overall market dry powder fell. Both are effectively new capital formation, not redeployment of the same $194 billion — which is precisely what a market running at 1.0x overhang needs to keep expanding.

The GP-led side is pricing conviction, not diversification

The other angle worth pulling out is what’s happening to return logic inside GP-led deals. Single-asset continuation vehicles now account for 53% of GP-led volume, up sharply from last year (SACV transaction volume rose 88% YoY), and the majority price at or above NAV. Normally, paying full price or a premium would compress forward returns. Instead, buyers are underwriting SACVs to average gross multiples of ~2.3x over four years, meaningfully higher than the ~1.9x targeted for multi-asset continuation vehicles, ~1.8x for single LP interests, and ~1.7x for diversified LP portfolios.

That is a real inversion of how secondaries traditionally priced risk. Diversified portfolios used to command the premium multiple for the diversification itself; now the highest return targets sit with the most concentrated, single-company bets, because buyers get the deepest diligence access and the clearest view of the exit path. Layer in that more than a third of GP-led deals now include super-carry terms, giving sponsors greater upside participation to win competitive processes, and the picture is a market where capital is being priced less like a portfolio-rebalancing tool and more like direct, high-conviction equity investing with a continuation-vehicle wrapper.

The one segment still waiting

If there’s a counterweight to the “capital is tight” thesis, it’s venture secondaries, where volume has stayed flat at $5 billion for a full year despite $10 billion of dedicated dry powder sitting largely idle: capital that exists but isn’t finding a home. The “SaaSpocalypse” repricing in public software bled into private marks in early 2026, widening bid-ask spreads and pushing buyers out of processes. Buyers there are demanding 20%+ net IRRs and creating what the report calls a K-shaped pricing environment: top-quartile AI-adjacent franchises clearing near par, everything else trading at steep discounts with a hollow middle. Venture is the one part of this market where dry powder abundance, not scarcity, is the live issue, a useful reminder that the capital-tightening story is a private equity, credit and infrastructure phenomenon first, not a universal one.

The takeaway

The headline framing a record first half, on track for a record year is true and worth reporting. But the more durable insight for anyone advising GPs, LPs or startups on secondary-market positioning is that the market has quietly shifted from a capital-surplus business to a capital-velocity business. Growth now depends on continuous, parallel fundraising, recycling and new-entrant capital formation rather than a deep static reserve. That single shift explains why evergreen structures are proliferating, why credit and infrastructure secondaries are scaling so fast, why SACV pricing looks more like direct dealmaking than portfolio liquidity management, and why venture, still sitting on unused dry powder, remains the market’s clearest outlier.

Then a three-year-old firm nobody outside the LP-relationship circuit had heard of closed the largest debut secondaries fund ever raised.

The number

Clipway, the London-based secondaries shop founded in 2023, has closed Clipway Secondary Fund I at $6.4 billion, 60% above its original $4 billion target, and enough to surpass Apollo’s $5.4 billion S3 Equity and Hybrid Solutions Fund I (closed May 2025) as the largest first-time secondaries vehicle on record. That’s not “large for a debut fund.” That’s large, full stop, for any secondaries vehicle raised by anyone.

The capital came from 186 LPs: sovereign wealth funds, pension plans, insurers, endowments, foundations and family offices, spread genuinely globally: Europe supplied 44%, North and Latin America 21%, the Middle East 18%, Asia 17%. Strategic backers include Mubadala Investment Company, Carmignac, and General Atlantic, the kind of anchor names that don’t show up on a debut fund by accident. Clipway’s own release goes further on the Carmignac relationship specifically, saying the firm has played “a key role in shaping and advancing Carmignac’s private equity platform”, a secondaries manager acting as architecture partner to one of its own strategic LPs, not just a capital recipient. Sovereign capital and established managers underwriting a three-year-old platform is itself a data point: it means the LP diligence process treated Clipway less like a startup bet and more like a known quantity. Clipway is now calling itself, in its own words, “the world’s largest independent, dedicated, tech-enabled secondaries firm”, a claim about category positioning, not AUM, but a bold one for a firm three years old.

Pedigree did the heavy lifting the fund needed

That “known quantity” framing traces straight back to where the founders came from. Vincent Gombault co-founded Ardian and ran its funds-of-funds and private debt business until December 2020. Ingmar Vallano was senior managing director for Ardian’s fund-of-funds and co-investment activity until 2021. Benoît Verbrugghe led Ardian USA and sat on its executive committee. Between them, that’s a combined multi-decade track record inside the platform widely regarded as the largest secondaries manager in the world, which is exactly the kind of resume that lets a brand-new firm skip the “prove yourselves on a small Fund I first” step that most new entrants don’t get to skip.

In other words: Clipway isn’t really a counter-example to the scale-and-pedigree consolidation thesis. It’s arguably a confirmation of it, wearing a different logo. LPs weren’t betting on an unproven team; they were betting on an Ardian-shaped team operating outside Ardian, unencumbered by a larger platform’s overhead and able to move faster.

Worth noting too: this isn’t a three-person shop trading on old business cards. Clipway’s own release puts headcount at 62 professionals across six offices, including 18 dedicated to data science and technology, and equity is deliberately spread across a wider partner group (Inigo Weston, Joshua Manasseh, Jonathan Hillgarth-Williams, Harry Vander Elst, David Enriquez and Adaleine Yong join the three Managing Partners), with no single individual holding more than 10% of the firm. That’s a governance choice as much as a cultural one: it signals the firm was built to outlast its three founders, not just monetize their Rolodexes. One regulatory detail that didn’t make the trade press: Clipway Limited operates as an appointed representative of Langham Hall Fund Management LLP rather than holding its own direct FCA authorization, a common, faster route to market for a new manager, but a reminder that “world’s largest independent secondaries firm” is still, in regulatory terms, a young platform riding on a host’s permissions.

The part that actually is new: TESS

Where Clipway does break from the playbook is technology. The firm has built TESS, a proprietary system that screens and underwrites deals against a database covering more than 38,500 private companies and 3,400 private equity funds before a human ever looks at the opportunity. The scale of the filtering is the real headline number here, and it’s not in the PitchBook piece: Clipway says it has processed more than $267 billion of opportunities through TESS to select the roughly $6 billion it has actually deployed, a hit rate of just over 2%. That’s the clearest evidence yet that TESS is functioning as a genuine screening filter rather than a marketing layer bolted onto a conventional sourcing team; you don’t publish a 2% conversion rate unless the funnel above it is real.

According to the firm, two-thirds of the $6 billion-plus in transaction volume it has deployed so far was sourced proprietarily and off-market, a genuinely high proportion for a strategy (diversified LP-led secondaries in North American and Western European buyout funds) where off-market sourcing has traditionally been a function of relationship depth built up over years, not software. Clipway has also extended TESS outward: strategic partners get access to the system to monitor and analyze their own private equity portfolios, turning what could have been a purely internal underwriting tool into a client-facing product in its own right.

That’s the actual thesis, in Vallano’s own words to PitchBook: “We are quite heavily focused on LP-led secondaries. And the idea of setting up a new company was really to focus on the use of technology to help approach the market, same old-fashioned strategy, but really approaching it in a more modern way.” Same strategy Ardian runs at scale; different infrastructure for finding and pricing the deals.

This matters beyond one fund

Clipway has already put the capital to work, more than $6 billion deployed across 1,403 underlying companies in 177 funds, a breadth of diversification that would take most new managers years to assemble manually, sourced from a $267 billion funnel most managers couldn’t process at all. If TESS is doing real underwriting work rather than just marketing gloss on top of a normal sourcing team, it’s a template worth watching: pedigree gets you in the door with LPs, but a sourcing system that can screen tens of thousands of companies before a human touches the file is what lets a three-year-old firm compete on deal flow against platforms with decades more history. Clipway frames its edge explicitly in discount terms too, the firm says its selectivity is designed “to generate alpha within the LP-led secondary market by acquiring high-quality private equity exposure at attractive discounts to market pricing,” with a deliberate tilt toward developed-market, mid-market companies.

The honest read for the rest of the market: this isn’t proof that scale doesn’t matter in secondaries. It’s proof that the fastest way to build scale from zero is to import it, in the form of a founding team’s relationships and a widely-shared partnership structure built to retain them, and then automate the one piece (sourcing breadth) that used to require headcount and time. Clipway itself is betting the timing works in its favor, pointing to “significant growth in the global secondaries market, driven by the continued expansion of private markets, slower exit activity and increasing demand for LP liquidity” as the backdrop for the raise. Worth watching whether Fund II, whenever it launches, tries to prove the tech was the real driver by targeting a number Ardian-pedigree alone couldn’t explain, and whether that $267 billion sourcing funnel keeps scaling as fast as the fund did.

The paper isolates five factors that determine the risk-return profile of any given secondary transaction and the MOIC and IRR ultimately reported to investors: value appreciation of the underlying assets, diversification, valuation and discount at entry, transaction-level leverage, and how cash flow recycling is accounted for. None of these are new vocabulary to anyone in the market. What’s useful is Abbott’s attempt to isolate and size each one, because in practice, most reported secondary returns blend all five into a single headline number, and that number tells an LP almost nothing about where the return actually came from.

The transaction-type spectrum isn’t optional context. It’s the starting point

Abbott’s framing starts from the observation that the secondaries market has stopped being one strategy. Diversification level now functions as the primary axis separating four distinct transaction archetypes, each underwritten to a different return target on an unlevered basis.

This is a useful quantified check on a framing that still shows up often: treating "secondaries" as one homogenous strategy with a single risk-return signature. A large diversified LP portfolio at 30-40% loan-to-value and a single-asset GP-led continuation vehicle are not the same asset class wearing different clothes. They sit at opposite ends of a genuine risk spectrum, and conflating them makes it harder for LPs to build a coherent secondaries allocation policy.

The discount is doing less work than the market thinks

“A buyer transacting at a 10% discount can report a 53.3% IRR after one quarter, purely from the mark-up to NAV. By month 18, that same discount-driven IRR has collapsed to 7.3%” , _{Abbott Capital, “Decoding Secondary Returns,” July 2026}

This directly quantifies a distortion that shows up constantly in how secondary transactions get marketed in their first year of life. Buy at a discount to NAV, mark the position back up to the GP’s reported NAV post-close, and the unrealized IRR in month one looks spectacular, not because value was created, but because of an accounting mechanic. Abbott’s decay curve shows that effect evaporating almost entirely within six quarters, which is a useful number to have on hand the next time a placement deck leads with a triple-digit early-stage IRR.

More importantly, Abbott runs the long-horizon comparison LPs actually care about: holding value appreciation constant at a 1.60x MOIC, moving from par pricing to a 10% discount only lifts the outcome to 1.78x MOIC and from 16.9% to 21.1% IRR. Discount matters, and it isn’t nothing, but across the life of the deal, it’s a secondary contributor sitting well behind the appreciation of the underlying companies themselves. That’s a materially different message than the “buy cheap, win big” pitch that still circulates in generalist coverage of the asset class, and it’s the strongest piece of quantitative support yet for the view that secondaries are a portfolio construction tool built on genuine value creation, not a distressed-asset bargain hunt.

What leverage actually does, and how fast it unwinds

The leverage section is the one GPs pitching levered secondary vehicles should expect LPs to start asking about directly. Abbott’s illustrative $500 million NAV portfolio, financed at 40% LTV with a cash-sweep amortization structure, lifts the unlevered base case from 1.60x/16.9% IRR to 1.94x/19.7% IRR. That’s a real uplift. But the paper’s distribution-delay sensitivity is the part worth sitting with: a three-year lag in distributions relative to the base case brings the levered MOIC down to 1.62x, barely above the unlevered 1.56x, and the entire benefit of the leverage has essentially disappeared under the weight of accruing interest and a slower-amortizing loan balance.

This recycling section is understated in the paper but may be the most operationally relevant finding for LPs doing manager selection. A 12-point MOIC gap (1.48x vs. 1.60x) purely from a reporting convention, on an identical underlying cash flow profile, is large enough to change a manager ranking. It’s a reminder that “MOIC” and “IRR” are not standardized enough terms to take at face value in a diligence process — the fine print on methodology deserves the same scrutiny as the fine print on fees.

About Abbott Capital Management

Abbott Capital Management, LLC is an independent investment adviser founded in 1986, specializing in the creation and management of private equity investment programs across private equity, growth equity, and venture capital. Since inception, the firm has committed more than $29 billion to over 850 primary, secondary, and co-investment transactions on behalf of its clients, a global investor base spanning public, corporate, and multi-employer pension funds, foundations, endowments, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals.

Abbott’s Secondary Investments team, led by Managing Director Wolf Witt alongside Vice President Declan Feeley and Senior Associate Alexis Maida, focuses on acquiring and analyzing secondary transactions across the full risk-return spectrum, from large, diversified multi-fund LP portfolios to concentrated single-asset GP-led continuation vehicles. As a fund-of-funds investor with its own capital allocated across the asset class.

Ropes & Gray’s Cautious Optimism: How Private Equity Is Navigating a New Era of Uncertainty, a midyear update to the firm’s 2025 European private capital research, built on partner and client interviews conducted between April and June 2026, lands on a single word to describe the state of the market: recalibration. Not retreat, not recovery. A market where capital is available and confidence holds, but where the mechanisms for deploying and realizing that confidence have become slower, more selective, and more structurally complex.

Read the report’s six themes side by side, and secondaries stop looking like a standalone chapter. They show up as the load-bearing element connecting regulatory drag, LP/GP tension, and the exit environment into a single story. That’s worth unpacking on its own terms, because it’s a cleaner articulation of the “secondaries as portfolio tool, not distress signal” thesis than most sell-side research manages, coming, notably, from a law firm rather than a placement agent or GP.

The Causal Chain the Report Draws, Whether It Means To or Not

The report’s own throughline is explicit in its regulation section: as regulatory regimes overlap and slow deal execution, the EU’s Foreign Subsidies Regulation now “actively enforced” alongside antitrust and FDI screening, U.S. antitrust posture shifting under new FTC/DOJ leadership even as SEC enforcement pulls back, the practical challenge stops being just getting deals done and becomes realizing value at all. That, the report argues, is precisely why the industry has turned “with greater conviction to secondaries and continuation vehicles.”

That’s a meaningful sentence to get from a law firm. It reframes secondaries not as a workaround born of weak exit markets, but as the direct downstream consequence of a regulatory environment that Ropes & Gray’s own partners describe as adding cost and complexity to deal execution across jurisdictions.

Structural, Not Cyclical, But Worth Stress-Testing

The report’s most load-bearing claim is that secondaries growth is structural rather than cyclical: GP-led continuation fund volumes hit record levels in 2025 despite an M&A and IPO environment that was, by the report’s own account, improving. Global secondaries transaction values reached $240 billion in 2025, up 48% year over year, and that growth held even as traditional exit routes opened up somewhat.

That’s the crux of the “portfolio tool, not distress signal” argument in data form, volume kept climbing precisely when it should have softened if secondaries were purely an exit-of-last-resort mechanism. It’s a genuinely useful data point for the thesis. It’s also an interpretive claim doing a lot of work on the back of one law firm’s client interviews rather than a broad market dataset, and it’s worth checking against Coller Capital’s Barometer or Jefferies’ own volume data before treating it as fully settled.

“If GPs still see strong growth potential, it is a sector and theme they still have conviction in, and they don’t believe there’s a better asset to acquire in that space — then it makes sense to retain that asset within their platform... rather than exit.”Elizabeth Todd, Partner & Co-Lead of European Private Equity Transactions Practice, Ropes & Gray

That’s about as direct a practitioner articulation of the conviction-driven CV as you’ll find outside a GP’s own investor letter, and it comes from the deal lawyer sitting across from the negotiation, not from a party with an economic stake in the transaction itself.

Where the Report Puts Secondaries Under the Microscope

The report doesn’t let secondaries off easy, either. Its LP/GP tensions section is the sharpest part of the analysis, and it’s where the “mainstream tool” framing meets its most serious friction: the GP frequently sits on both sides of a continuation vehicle transaction, and that structural conflict is drawing heightened LP scrutiny on process, pricing, and disclosure. The report notes this has, “in a handful of cases,” already produced litigation, a detail that deserves its own follow-up rather than a passing mention.

WHAT “GOOD PROCESS” LOOKS LIKE, PER STEVE ZAORSKI (ROPES & GRAY, NEW YORK)

• A competitively priced GP-led process run through a formal auction led by a reputable placement agent

• Independent validation by a third-party valuation provider

• True optionality for LPs, a genuine choice between selling out or rolling into the new vehicle, not a soft push toward rolling

• A meaningful GP commitment: typically a full roll of the GP’s own capital and carry on the asset into the CV

• A specific value-creation plan and timeline for the asset’s next phase

• An LP Advisory Committee genuinely empowered to vet conflicts of interest, not a rubber stamp

That checklist is a useful diagnostic for any LP or GP trying to benchmark a process against what institutional investors are now treating as table stakes. It also implicitly signals where the market’s next governance fight is heading: the report flags early discussion of “CV squared” structures, assets rolled repeatedly across successive continuation vehicles without a clear ultimate exit — as a point where LP sensitivity is likely to increase. Worth watching as 2020–21 vintages hit extension windows over the next 12–18 months.

Regional Divergence: Where Secondaries Sit in Each Market’s Maturity Curve

That regional split is a useful corrective to any narrative that treats “secondaries going mainstream” as a single global phenomenon happening at the same pace everywhere. It isn’t. The U.S. market’s depth is precisely what’s generating the governance and litigation pressure described above, a more mature market produces more sophisticated LPs, which produces more scrutiny, which produces more process discipline. Europe is following the same trajectory a step behind. Asia is a different market altogether, where IPO windows and strategic trade sales still dominate and secondaries remain a supplementary tool rather than a default one.

The AI Wrinkle: A New Source of Assets Entering the Secondaries Pipeline

One connection the report doesn’t draw out explicitly, but that falls out naturally from reading the AI and exit sections together: AI-driven valuation uncertainty, particularly the repricing hitting SaaS and software assets exposed to obsolescence risk, is creating exactly the kind of asset that ends up in a continuation vehicle. A GP holding a software platform it still believes in, but that the public market or a strategic buyer is currently mispricing on AI-disruption fears, has a strong incentive to hold rather than sell into that mispricing. Expect this to show up as a growing category of CV rationale over the next few quarters, distinct from the more familiar “we still like this asset and don’t want to force an exit” logic.

About Ropes & Gray

Ropes & Gray is a global law firm with more than 1,500 lawyers and legal professionals across offices in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., London, Dublin, Milan, Paris, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo. The firm has been ranked in the top three of The American Lawyer’s “A-List” for nine consecutive years. Its practice areas include asset management, private equity, M&A, finance, real estate, tax, antitrust, life sciences, healthcare, intellectual property, litigation and enforcement, privacy and cybersecurity, and business restructuring.

_{Secondary Scoop | Analysis based on Ropes & Gray, Cautious Optimism: How Private Equity Is Navigating a New Era of Uncertainty (July 2026). Data points independently sourced to McKinsey’s Global Private Markets Report 2026, KPMG’s Pulse of Private Equity Q4 2025, and Secondaries Investor.}

On its own, that’s a fundraising story: a sequel fund more than tripling its predecessor’s size, backed by institutional capital from 26 countries spanning pensions, sovereign wealth funds, insurers, banks, endowments, and family offices.¹ But the more interesting story is what AAF II confirms about how AlpInvest has chosen to organize its entire secondaries business, and what that organization says about where the broader market is heading.

From $500 Million to $1.7 Billion in Four Years

AlpInvest’s first single-asset vehicle, Atom Fund I, launched in late 2022 targeting $500 million, a modest, almost experimental allocation at the time, arriving as the firm was navigating a co-head transition and beginning to rebrand parts of its secondaries platform. AAF II’s $1.7 billion close represents more than a threefold increase in roughly four years, a trajectory that echoes, and arguably outpaces, the doubling the firm’s flagship commingled secondaries fund achieved over the same period.

That parallel is the editorial hook here. AlpInvest isn’t simply raising more capital across its existing secondaries sleeve; it has built a second, structurally distinct vehicle purely for single-company exposure, and that vehicle is now scaling at a faster clip than the diversified flagship. Single-asset CVs were, for years, executed opportunistically out of multi-strategy secondaries pools. A dedicated, repeat, hard-capped fund line is a different signal: it tells GPs that AlpInvest can underwrite and lead the largest, most concentrated continuation deals with capital that was raised specifically for that purpose, not capital being stretched across a diversified secondaries mandate.

“What sets Carlyle AlpInvest apart in this market is not just the dedicated capital, but the platform behind it.”— Julian Rampelmann, Partner, Head of Single-Asset Secondaries and Deputy Head of Secondaries and Portfolio Finance, Carlyle AlpInvest

The Architecture Behind the Announcement

To understand where AAF II sits, it helps to see the full stack. AlpInvest’s Secondaries & Portfolio Finance strategy is now the largest single business line within the platform’s total $106.9 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2026, ahead of both co-investments and primary fund investments.² That is itself a notable shift for a firm whose roots and brand were built on primary fund commitments.

Reading the Deal, Not Just the Release

The single-asset category deserves scrutiny on its own terms, separate from AlpInvest’s specific fund. Single-asset continuation vehicles concentrate risk on one sponsor’s conviction about one company, which is precisely why dedicated capital pools, rather than allocations carved out of diversified funds, have become the industry’s preferred underwriting structure. A diversified secondaries fund sizing single-asset exposure as one line item among dozens faces a different portfolio construction problem than a fund built to concentrate capital in a handful of the highest-conviction, largest-check transactions in the market.

AlpInvest frames the SACV strategy as a natural extension of sponsor relationships built over 25 years and roughly $7 billion committed across 31 transactions in the strategy since 2018.¹That track record matters for a market where SACV pricing and structuring still varies significantly by lead investor sophistication, and where the largest transactions increasingly require a lead that can write the full check rather than syndicate it down.

_{Editorial note on sourcing: Figures on AAF II and the firm’s $7 billion SACV capacity are drawn from Carlyle AlpInvest’s July 15, 2026 press release. AUM segmentation and individual fund sizes for ASF V through ASF VIII and ASPF II are cross-referenced against Carlyle Group Inc.’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, filed with the SEC — not restated from secondary press coverage. As this announcement originates directly from Carlyle AlpInvest, readers should weigh the framing of its own track record and market positioning accordingly.}

_{Sources: [1] Carlyle AlpInvest press release, July 15, 2026. [2] Carlyle Group Inc. Form 10-Q, quarter ended March 31, 2026, and Q1 2026 earnings supplement, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.}

The data agrees with the incentive

Asante puts 2025 secondary transaction value, combined GP- and LP-led, at an all-time high, citing Kroll’s March 2026 assessment of continuation funds as a viable exit alternative. That figure represents 69% cumulative growth since 2021, a roughly 14% compound annual rate. Co-investment capital raised followed a choppier path, peaking above $30 billion in 2021 before dropping to $15.9 billion in 2024 and rebounding to $25.3 billion in 2025, a reminder that “multi-track” has not meant uniform growth across every track, only that the tracks have become interdependent.

What is more interesting than the volume figure is what Asante says is driving it. The report identifies DPI as having “firmly overtaken IRR and TVPI as the metric of primary focus” in re-up conversations, no longer a preference, but a prerequisite. That is a significant claim from an advisor embedded in live fundraising processes across three continents, and it aligns with what Secondary Scoop has argued since this platform’s founding: secondaries are not a distress signal. They are the mechanism by which a DPI-starved LP base gets paid, and increasingly the mechanism GPs build into fund strategy from day one rather than reach for defensively.

“Liquidity is no longer a preference. It is the prerequisite that frames every allocation decision.”, Asante Capital Group, Q2 2026 Market Pulse

Reading the advisor’s arithmetic

Asante’s own “unforgiving arithmetic” chart is worth sitting with. GPs and strategies in market are rising; available LP capital is tightening. That gap is precisely the gap an advisory platform is paid to help GPs navigate, and it is also precisely the gap that has pushed fundraising timelines from an average of 14 months in 2000 to 30 months through 2026 year-to-date, per the Buyouts Fundraiser Report data Asante cites. A GP staring down a 30-month close has every incentive to diversify its capital-raising toolkit, and every incentive to pay an advisor to help it do so.

None of this makes the underlying liquidity constraint fictional. Distributions remain below historical norms; LPs are holding aged, unrealised portfolios; and the denominator effect has left many overcommitted relative to their own pacing models. Asante’s report is honest about naming secondaries as a “core liquidity management instrument” rather than an opportunistic one, language that mirrors, almost exactly, how GPs and LPs alike have described the shift over the past eighteen months in earnings calls and barometer surveys across the market.

The advisor is staffing up to match the thesis

Asante’s own hiring backs up the argument, if not always the framing. The firm has just added Robin Seng as a Managing Director in its Hong Kong office, joining the Secondaries team after more than a decade advising on secondary transactions across Asia, most recently as part of the senior team at Evercore. His mandate covers GP- and LP-led transactions, with particular depth in continuation funds and LP-led liquidity solutions, the same two structures the Market Pulse names as central to its “multi-track” thesis.

Read alongside the Market Pulse, the hire is less a footnote than a data point in its own right: an advisor betting headcount on the same regional growth story it is telling clients. Asia-based continuation fund and LP-led activity has been thinner than the North American and European markets Secondary Scoop covers most closely, and a senior Evercore hand relocating to build out that coverage is a reasonable signal that the region’s deal flow is catching up, regardless of what the accompanying quarterly commentary chooses to emphasize.

Where the framing gets ahead of the evidence

• The claim that multi-track strategies will become “standard practice, not optional” is a forecast, not an observed outcome; Asante’s own co-investment fundraising data shows meaningful volatility year to year, not a smooth institutionalization curve.

• “Seeded and warehoused portfolios” are presented as a third emergent pillar alongside secondaries and co-investment, but the report offers no volume data for this category, an asymmetry worth noting when the other two pillars are quantified in detail.

• The report’s framing treats intermediated access as an unambiguous LP benefit (”curation and diligence... difficult to replicate internally”) without acknowledging that intermediation also layers additional fees onto an already fee-sensitive LP base focused on net DPI.

Some Extra Thoughts

Placement agent research occupies an odd space in the secondaries commentary landscape. It is closer to the ground than most bank research, Asante is in fundraising rooms, not just modelling from Preqin data, but it is also structurally incapable of concluding that GPs should do less capital-raising, or that fewer intermediaries would serve LPs better. Treat the pattern-recognition as useful and the prescription as self-interested.

The more durable takeaway sits underneath the advisory framing: DPI has become the currency LPs actually transact in, and secondaries are how GPs mint it when the traditional exit channel won’t cooperate. That is not a new observation on this platform. What is new is watching a placement agent build its entire quarterly pitch around the same thesis, which suggests the “secondaries as portfolio management tool” argument has moved from contrarian to consensus faster than even we expected.

_{Sources: Asante Capital Group, “Q2 2026 Market Pulse” (July 2026), citing Kroll (”Secondary Market Evolution: Continuation Funds Emerge as a Viable Alternative to Traditional Exits,” March 2026), Preqin (May–June 2026), and Buyouts’ Fundraiser Report. Secondary Scoop’s analysis and framing are its own.}

Acurio Ventures has closed Acurio Secondaries I FCR, a €115 million vehicle dedicated exclusively to fund-level secondary transactions involving European venture capital funds, beating its original €100 million target in what several of the firm’s peers have called the toughest European VC fundraising environment in a generation. The Bilbao-based manager, founded in 2018 by Ander Michelena (a Ticketbis co-founder), Diego Recondo, Kate Cornell and Hugo Fernández-Mardomingo, now oversees more than €450 million across five vehicles: three direct-investment funds and two dedicated to fund secondaries.

The headline number is not really the point. What makes this fund editorially interesting is where Acurio says it is choosing not to compete: the firm is targeting stakes below €20 million in mature venture funds, a segment it argues is systematically ignored by the continent-scale secondaries platforms, the Ardians, Collers and Blackstone Strategic Partners of the world, whose deal sizes and staffing economics make sub-€20 million LP interests uneconomical to chase.

Twelve months after an initial close at the end of June 2025, the fund has committed close to €45 million and reports a TVPI of 1.75x, a mark-up Acurio attributes to the discounts negotiated on entry rather than to underlying portfolio performance since acquisition. That distinction matters: it’s the discount, not distributions, doing the work at this stage, which is exactly the mechanism that lets a secondaries buyer claim to have side-stepped the J-curve before the portfolio has had time to season.

"We continue to seek creative and differentiated strategies adapted to market conditions, with the aim of continuing to generate value for our investors and developing into a leading firm in Europe." ANDER MICHELENA, FOUNDING PARTNER, ACURIO VENTURES

The capital base is instructive. Roughly 30% came from institutional investors, including an undisclosed large US-based endowment, pension plans, and more than 35 family offices, a mix Acurio frames as validation given the fundraising conditions of the past year. The GP commitment exceeds €15 million, a figure well above what’s typical for a fund of this size, which the firm is positioning as an alignment signal to LPs evaluating a first-time dedicated secondaries strategy.

"Successfully launching a new fund of this nature in such a difficult fundraising market for VC, and doing so with a 100% private investor base that includes prestigious institutional investors, is a milestone and a validation that reinforces the strategy we have been pursuing."DIEGO RECONDO, PARTNER, ACURIO VENTURES

A Crowded Year for European Fund Closes, But Not This Kind

Acurio’s close lands in a year that has already produced several sizeable European venture fund announcements, most of them primary vehicles rather than secondaries strategies. Kembara reported a €750 million first close toward a €1 billion deeptech target; Earlybird VC closed Fund VIII at €360 million; Seedcamp raised €279 million across its first-cheque and follow-on vehicles; and DFF Ventures closed a €70 million Fund III. Spanish peers have also been active, with Samaipata, Ysios Capital and Mission announcing funds targeting €110 million, €100 million and €35 million respectively.

That’s the framing worth sitting with. Every other fund on that list is solving for deployment, getting capital into companies or into new fund vintages. Acurio is solving for the opposite problem: what happens to capital that’s already been deployed, into funds that are now eight-plus years old, with LPs and GPs alike facing a market where IPO windows have narrowed and M&A exits increasingly require far larger revenue and EBITDA thresholds than they did a few years ago. The two dynamics, a primary market still raising at pace, and a secondaries market forming around the maturing back-book of that same period, aren’t in tension. They’re two views of the same European venture cycle.

The Dual-Strategy Argument

Acurio’s direct-investment track record gives the secondaries pitch some texture. The firm has invested in roughly 120 European companies through its direct strategy, with a portfolio that includes Seedtag, Voy, Preply, Jobandtalent, Indexa Capital, Lingokids and Refurbed. Its latest direct vehicle, Acurio Ventures III, closed above €150 million in 2024 and remains in its investment period, holding more than 40 companies. The firm was also disclosed as an investor in Lexroom’s €42.9 million Series B in May 2026.

The argument Acurio is making to LPs is that running both strategies under one roof, direct exposure to founders and portfolio companies, alongside fund-level secondaries, gives the firm visibility into both sides of the market it says it wants to help unlock: the GPs holding maturing portfolios, and the underlying companies whose exit timing determines whether those funds can eventually return capital.

The number that matters isn’t the growth rate

The headline stat is familiar to anyone who follows this market: annual secondary volume has gone from roughly $23 billion in 2010 to an estimated $250 billion in 2025, a tenfold increase in fifteen years. That’s the number every secondaries deck opens with, ours included.

The more interesting number sits two sentences later. Blackstone’s own citation puts annual secondary turnover at less than 2% of total private markets AUM. Pair that with the report’s separate data point: $13 trillion in cumulative remaining value and unfunded commitments sitting across private market vintages back to 2005, and you get the actual argument, which isn’t about growth rate at all. It’s about denominator.

One correction worth flagging on that $13 trillion figure: it isn’t purely a private equity number. Blackstone’s own footnote defines it as remaining value and unfunded commitments across “private equity, credit, real estate and real assets”, the full private markets complex, not PE alone. That doesn’t weaken the argument. If anything, a $13 trillion pool spanning multiple asset classes is a larger and more durable overhang than a PE-only figure would suggest, and it matches the direction Blackstone’s own secondaries platform has been expanding in.

A market moving $250 billion a year against a $13 trillion pool of remaining exposure isn’t a mature market clearing its backlog. It’s a market that has barely started. That’s the case Coller and Carlyle AlpInvest have both been making in their own barometers this cycle, the difference here is that Blackstone arrives at the same conclusion from the LP-commitment side of the ledger rather than the deal-volume side.

A market moving $250 billion a year against $13 trillion in remaining exposure isn’t clearing a backlog. It’s barely started.

Why the LP base itself is the story

Blackstone frames this growth as a function of the buyer base, not just the asset pool. The number of active institutional investors across private equity, real estate and infrastructure has grown roughly eightfold since 2009, from about 2,500 to an estimated 20,000 today, while annual commitments across those same strategies have more than tripled to roughly $1.1 trillion. Every one of those LPs is a future secondary seller, buyer, or both, an expanding universe that didn’t exist when secondaries were still read as a distress signal rather than a liquidity tool.

That expansion is precisely why Blackstone’s own note on market structure lands the way it does: sourcing across “a fragmented global ecosystem” now requires GP relationships spanning strategies, vintages, and geographies, plus underwriting conviction across LP-led, GP-led, and GP-stakes transactions simultaneously. Scale isn’t a nice-to-have in that description, it’s positioned as the entire moat. As the final section below shows, that description happens to match Blackstone’s own secondaries business almost exactly.

The adjacent data that reinforces the thesis

Two other threads in the report matter for anyone tracking the CV and exit landscape, even though neither is filed under “secondaries.”

Inside Strategic Partners: what the growth actually looks like

The CIO letter’s one page on secondaries is written in the abstract — market size, LP count, structural argument. What it doesn’t do is describe Blackstone’s own position in that market, which is worth doing separately, because the numbers are large enough to be the story in their own right.

Blackstone’s secondaries platform, Strategic Partners, started outside the firm entirely. It was founded in 2000 as an independent secondary private equity shop, and by the time Blackstone came calling it had raised just over $11 billion of capital commitments and completed more than 700 transactions. Blackstone acquired it from Credit Suisse in August 2013, when it managed about $9 billion. Verdun Perry, who joined Strategic Partners at its founding in 2000, has run the business — and chaired the investment committee for every fund it has raised — for the entire 26 years since, through both ownership changes.

• 2000: Strategic Partners founded as an independent secondaries manager. Raises over $11bn and completes 700+ transactions before being acquired.

• 2013: Blackstone acquires Strategic Partners from Credit Suisse. AUM at acquisition: ~$9bn.

• 2022: AUM reaches $67bn (as of Sept 30), across private equity, real estate, infrastructure and GP-led strategies.

• 2023: Closes Strategic Partners IX at $22.2bn — the world’s largest dedicated secondaries fund raised to that date — alongside its inaugural dedicated GP-led continuation fund strategy, Strategic Partners GP Solutions, at $2.7bn.

• 2025: SP IX is nearly fully committed ($19.7bn of $22.2bn by year-end). Strategic Partners Infrastructure IV closes at $5.5bn in September — the largest dedicated infrastructure secondaries fund ever raised. Platform AUM reaches ~$91bn.

• 2026: Strategic Partners crosses $100bn in AUM in Q1, per Jon Gray on the April 23 earnings call. Its flagship successor fund, Strategic Partners Fund X, holds an initial close of $5bn, then adds $6bn more in the same quarter — $11bn raised so far toward a still-undisclosed target.

The platform now spans four distinct secondary strategies — private equity, GP-led/continuation vehicles, infrastructure, and real estate — with more than 2,350 transactions completed since 2000. A fifth is reportedly being built: trade press has reported that Blackstone is developing a dedicated private credit secondaries strategy to sit inside Strategic Partners, though the firm hasn’t confirmed this publicly. If it materializes, it would put Blackstone in the same race as Ares, which closed a $7.1bn dedicated credit secondaries fund in January, and would track an industry-wide shift — 2025 was the first year fund manager-led (GP-led) secondary volume overtook allocator-led (LP-led) volume industry-wide, with more than $7bn of dedicated credit continuation vehicles closing across the market that year.

Put the CIO letter’s abstract argument next to this timeline and the connection is hard to miss. “Deep GP relationships,” “a broad view across strategies, vintages, and geographies,” underwriting “quickly and with conviction across LP-led, GP-led, and GP stakes transactions” — that isn’t a general description of what wins in a fragmented market. It’s a fairly literal description of what Strategic Partners has spent four fund families and 13 years under Blackstone’s ownership building. The CIO letter frames scale as the moat. Strategic Partners is the moat.

The takeaway

None of the market-level data is new information. What’s notable is where it’s coming from, and what it lines up with once you look past the one page it’s written on. A firm-wide CIO letter, written for LPs, allocators, and internal audiences well beyond the secondaries desk, independently arrives at the same structural argument this publication has been making all year: the overhang is enormous, the clearing mechanism is still tiny relative to it, and the buyer and seller base underpinning both sides of that trade keeps getting deeper. That’s not a market waiting for a catalyst. It’s a market whose catalyst already happened — and the firm that wrote this letter has spent over a decade and four flagship fund families positioning itself to be the one clearing it.

_{Secondary Scoop · Source: Blackstone Office of the CIO, “2026 Mid-Year Investment Perspectives,” June 2026. Data and charts redrawn by Secondary Scoop; original figures and endnote sourcing available in the source document.}

The number: 5% of mid/large buyout deal flow, gone within a decade

Secondary buyouts, one fund manager selling a portfolio company to another, have averaged 36% of exit value over the past 20 years and sat close to 40% in 2025. Schroders’ base case has continuation investments rising from 9% of total private equity exit value in 2025 to 12.5% by 2035. Critically, the firm models that entire increase as coming directly out of the secondary buyout share, which it forecasts falling from 31% to 27.8% over the same period. Since secondary buyouts have represented roughly half of new deal sourcing for mid and large buyout managers over the past decade, Schroders translates that shift into a headline estimate: about 5% of total mid/large buyout deal flow will be displaced over the next 10 years, relative to where it would otherwise sit.

“The most significant disruption is not in the concept of holding companies for longer under private equity ownership, but rather in who retains ownership.”

SCHRODERS CAPITAL, KEY TAKEAWAYS, JUNE 2026

That reframes the competitive stakes considerably. Companies staying in private equity hands for longer isn’t new, sponsor-to-sponsor deals have done that for two decades. What’s being modeled now is a reallocation of control: away from the buyer-side manager who would previously have won the next auction, and toward the incumbent GP working alongside a lead underwriter instead. It is the first time this has been expressed as a number rather than a general trend.

HOW THE ESTIMATE IS BUILT

The 5% figure rests on three assumptions holding simultaneously: that trade sale and IPO share of exits stays roughly flat, that continuation investment share keeps climbing from 9.0% toward 12.5% by 2035, and that secondary buyouts continue to represent about half of mid/large buyout deal sourcing. None of those assumptions are unreasonable on their own, but none are independently stress-tested, worth treating as a modeled estimate rather than an observed trend.

Why the growth looks structural rather than cyclical

Schroders’ own data shows 2025 volumes coming in ahead of what the firm projected a year earlier, $109bn against a revised 2024 base of $76bn, while the cyclical share of that growth actually fell, to 9% in 2025 from 14% in 2024. In other words, even as exit markets show early signs of recovery, continuation investment growth is becoming less dependent on distressed conditions, not more.

That lines up with what limited partners themselves are now saying. Coller Capital’s Summer 2026 Global Private Capital Barometer, surveying 108 LPs overseeing roughly $2 trillion in assets, found that 69% expect CV activity to hold or increase even if traditional exit channels fully recover; only 31% expect a decline. Coller’s data points to a structural mismatch behind that expectation: LPs disagree among themselves about the right holding period for any given asset, with 39% saying GPs aren’t providing liquidity early enough and 22% saying trophy assets are being sold too soon. Continuation vehicles resolve that tension by letting a single GP decision, hold the asset, accommodate LPs who want to exit and LPs who want to keep their exposure, simultaneously.

The “GP-led secondaries” label is a misnomer, Schroders argues

The paper also makes a pointed case against a piece of market shorthand: the term “GP-led secondaries,” often used interchangeably with continuation investments. Schroders argues this creates real confusion, for three reasons: fund managers typically retain (and often increase) their interest in the underlying company rather than crystallizing carry the way a genuine exit would require; these deals usually include a primary component of fresh capital rather than being a pure ownership transfer; and it is the incoming lead underwriter, not the GP, who structures the deal and runs full due diligence.

“When continuation investments are described as ‘private equity selling to itself,’ this is exactly not what these transactions are about,” the paper states. Ares Management has made a related argument in its own recent research, framing GP-led deals as private markets alpha against LP-led “beta,” and pointing to a specific mechanical source of that alpha: continuation vehicle pricing is typically locked at the signing date rather than at closing, so any value the company creates in the months between signing and close, revenue growth, multiple expansion, debt paydown, accrues to the incoming buyer rather than the seller. It’s a structural return enhancement that doesn’t show up in the initial underwriting model.

New data points worth tracking

• 31% of realized buyout portfolio companies are statistical candidates for continuation investments, according to Schroders’ analysis of roughly 2,600 realized deals in its own database, using a return-multiple threshold (2x TVPI) typical of sponsor-to-sponsor and CV target returns.

• $5.7bn in estimated annual fee savings for investors, based on 2025 volumes: continuation vehicle management fees run at roughly half the level of traditional buyouts, with more tiered carried interest.

• A 1.5-year shorter holding period for continuation investments versus traditional buyouts, based on Schroders’ own sample of 91 completed CV exits against 72 buyout co-investment exits. Worth flagging: the paper’s executive summary describes this as “about 25% shorter holding periods,” while the body text calculates a 35% faster time-to-liquidity from the same underlying gap, the two figures aren’t quite consistent with each other.

• A third-party return study from Evercore, covering 387 continuation funds formed between 2018 and 2024, found returns broadly comparable to traditional buyout funds but with lower dispersion, external support for the “more predictable returns” case that doesn’t rely solely on Schroders’ own deal data.

The case for the lower mid-market, updated for a more volatile world

Schroders continues to argue that small and mid-sized buyout companies, those with enterprise values below roughly $1bn, offer the most attractive continuation opportunities, citing lower entry multiples (up to 40% below large-cap buyouts, up to 55% below Russell 2000 peers), a wider set of exit routes, and greater potential for operational transformation. This year’s paper adds a timelier justification: geopolitical insulation. Citing “the latest conflict in the Middle East and related energy price shock,” the firm argues that smaller, more domestically-focused, services-weighted portfolios are less exposed to the trade and geopolitical tensions currently driving market volatility. Private equity-backed companies generate about 90% of revenue domestically compared with 60% for public companies, and PE portfolios run roughly 83% services versus 17% goods, compared with a near-even split for the MSCI index.

A STRUCTURAL IDEA ALREADY TAKING SHAPE ELSEWHERE

Schroders also floats what it calls “hybrid continuation investment” structures, an incumbent GP retaining control of a company’s transformation while a second fund manager takes a partial stake to contribute a specific capability, such as regional expansion or IPO preparation. Jasmin Capital’s most recent market newsletter describes a similar structure already in use, sometimes called a co-control continuation vehicle: 50% of a company is sold to a new sponsor through a competitive M&A process, and the remaining 50% is rolled into a continuation vehicle managed by the incumbent GP at the price set by that process. It’s a genuine innovation worth watching either way, the concept of splitting control between an exiting-price-setting sponsor and a continuing incumbent may be more consequential than either single research note suggests on its own.

_{Sources: Schroders Capital, "Continuation investments continue to grow – and to reshape the buyout market," In Focus, June 2026 (Nils Rode, Petr Poldauf, Eufemiano Fuentes Perez). Coller Capital, Global Private Capital Barometer, 44th Edition, Summer 2026. ILPA, 2026 Continuation Vehicle Guidance (comment period draft). Ares Management, "Why Now for GP-Led Secondaries," June 2026. William Blair Private Capital Advisory, Q2 2026 Quarterly Newsletter. Jasmin Capital, Newsletter N°13/2026. Underlying market data via Preqin, Pitchbook, Jefferies, Greenhill, Evercore, Lazard and PJT.}

The comparison Eurazeo itself draws is the telling one: ESF V’s predecessor closed at €1 billion in 2021. A single vintage more than doubling in five years is not typical growth for a mature strategy; it’s a re-rating. Eurazeo credits “growing investor demand for its disciplined strategy and differentiated market positioning” — read: a European mid-market secondaries book that institutional allocators are increasingly willing to pay up for, at a moment when the largest global platforms (Ardian, Coller, Lexington, AlpInvest) continue to absorb most of the headline fundraising.

Who wrote the checks

The commitment base spans sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, financial institutions, family offices and private wealth clients — a diversification Eurazeo highlights as evidence of broadening secondaries adoption beyond the traditional institutional LP base. Private wealth’s presence on that list is consistent with the broader retailization trend running through the secondaries market over the past two years, as managers built feeder structures to bring evergreen and wealth-channel capital into strategies historically reserved for large institutions.

“The strong increase in commitments reflects the growing recognition of our strategy in the market and the relevance of our differentiated positioning.”

— Christophe Simon, Managing Partner, Secondaries & Mandates, Eurazeo

“Against a volatile market backdrop, we are seeing a record level of opportunities, and ESF V is already well into its deployment phase.”

— Amine Rais, Partner, Secondaries & Mandates, Eurazeo

The platform context

ESF V’s close lifts Eurazeo’s Secondaries & Mandates AUM past €6.4 billion, now 17% of the Group’s roughly €39 billion in total assets under management — a business line built by a dedicated team of more than 30 professionals covering both GP-led and traditional LP secondaries. For a diversified manager whose broader identity is private equity, private debt, real estate and infrastructure, secondaries is becoming a proportionally larger and more strategically load-bearing piece of the platform.

TREND 01

The records keep converging, not just compounding

All three reports independently land in the same range for 2025, and it is worth pausing on how rare that kind of agreement is. Asante, citing Kroll, puts combined GP- and LP-led secondary transaction value at $226bn for 2025, an all-time high and a 69% increase since 2021. William Blair’s own tally puts 2025 at $220bn. Jasmin and Flexstone Partners’ David Arcauz cite GP-led volume alone as having “surpassed $100bn.” For 2026, the forecasts converge again: William Blair projects $250bn, matching Campbell Lutyens’ separate projection reported earlier this year.

What is notable is not the growth curve itself, which has been reported all year, but that three firms with different books of business, a placement agent, a European boutique, and an investment bank’s advisory arm, are no longer describing different markets. The estimates have converged. That is a signal the market has moved from “hard to size” to “sized, and still growing.”

TREND 02

The GP-led story is really a single-asset story

Inside that GP-led growth, William Blair’s data shows where the capital is actually concentrating: single-asset continuation funds (SACFs), vehicles built around one portfolio company rather than a diversified basket. SACF volume grew from $34bn in 2024 to $60bn in 2025 and now accounts for 55% of GP-led category volume, a share the firm says kept rising through the first half of 2026 even as multi-asset continuation fund (MACF) activity declined. William Blair points to its own $850m single-asset continuation fund for Ares Management’s Convergint Technologies, closed in February 2026, as an example, part of what it describes as more than $10bn of GP-led volume the firm closed or signed in the preceding two quarters.

That concentration pattern lines up with Jasmin’s own framing of the driver behind the CV boom: GPs using continuation vehicles “for the first time to retain some of their trophy assets.” SACFs are, structurally, the vehicle built for exactly that use case, and the data suggests it is where sponsors are increasingly putting their effort, not diversified multi-asset vehicles.

TREND 03

Liquidity is the only conversation, but not every channel is benefiting from it

Across all three reports, liquidity has displaced returns as the central topic. Asante states plainly that DPI has overtaken IRR and TVPI as the metric LPs scrutinize in re-up discussions, a point Reverence Capital’s Milton Berlinski independently corroborates in his Jasmin interview, noting that five-year DPI across the industry has run below historical norms. Fundraising timelines have stretched accordingly: Asante’s data, citing Buyouts’ Fundraiser Report, shows the average span from first to final close reaching 30 to 32 months in 2024 to 2025, up from roughly 14 months in 2000.

Liquidity innovation, particularly in secondaries and GP-led transactions, is becoming more institutionalized.

Milton Berlinski, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Reverence Capital Partners; interview, Jasmin Capital Newsletter N°13/2026

But the liquidity story is not evenly distributed across the tools built to deliver it. Asante’s own co-investment chart shows capital raised falling to $4.6bn year to date in 2026, against $25.3bn for full-year 2025 and a 2021 peak of $30bn. Annualized, that is a fraction of last year’s pace, even as secondaries and continuation funds keep setting records. If liquidity is the theme of H1 2026, secondaries specifically, not the broader “access” toolkit, is where the capital is actually landing.

TREND 04

Structural innovation is outrunning LP governance

Jasmin’s newsletter documents a genuine structural advance this year: the co-control continuation vehicle.

EXPLAINER: CO-CONTROL CVS

A co-control continuation vehicle sells 50% of a portfolio company to a new sponsor through a competitive M&A process, then transfers the remaining 50% into a CV managed by the incumbent GP, at the same valuation established by that process. It is pitched as a “third way” between a majority CV and a full trade sale: the GP secures a market-tested price for existing LPs and keeps an active stake, and the asset gains a second sponsor’s complementary expertise, at the cost of co-governance complexity between two firms now sharing control of one company.

Even as that kind of innovation spreads, Jasmin concedes that LP governance has not kept pace. “One of LPs’ most common criticisms of CVs is the lack of a genuine choice: either they take the cash option, or the roll-over option,” the firm writes, with no status-quo option to simply leave the asset in the original fund. The roll-over option itself is only realistic for LPs “equipped and accustomed to deciding on direct investment opportunities within a few weeks,” typically funds-of-funds, leaving institutions whose mandate is manager selection, rather than direct underwriting, with cash as their only practical outcome. Jasmin’s own forecast, drawn from its proprietary Secondaries Index, expects GPs to run 1 to 2 CVs per fund by 2030, which only sharpens the question of whether LP-side process has caught up with GP-side adoption.

TREND 05

Secondaries is expanding well beyond buyout

Flexstone’s Arcauz, interviewed in the Jasmin newsletter, describes GP-led transactions “expanding beyond buyout into infrastructure, credit and venture strategies,” alongside continued scaling of NAV financing and GP liquidity solutions. William Blair’s newsletter independently confirms the pattern from the LP-led and platform side, noting the emergence of sector-focused specialists, including venture LP secondaries, infrastructure-specific fundraises and secondary real estate practices, alongside large platforms building out credit-focused secondaries capabilities. Both firms frame this the same way: a signal that limited partners and secondary buyers are growing more comfortable moving outside the traditional buyout strategy that has anchored the market historically.

TREND 06

The firms selling this narrative are consolidating around it

The clearest cross-report theme is one none of the three highlights as their lead story: the advisory and placement-agent layer sitting on top of the secondaries market is itself consolidating. Asante notes that capital is concentrating toward the top of the market, with mega-funds and established franchises capturing a disproportionate share of commitments. Flexstone’s Arcauz states outright, in the Jasmin interview, that “consolidation across asset managers is accelerating as firms seek to broaden capabilities and increase AUM.” William Blair goes furthest, naming platform consolidation as an explicit 2026 theme in its own right, with insiders expecting the trend to continue over the next couple of years and “increasing pressure to grow faster.”

That is not an abstract observation this quarter. It is the same window in which Lazard agreed to acquire secondaries placement agent Campbell Lutyens for roughly $575m to form “Lazard CL,” and Houlihan Lokey agreed to acquire energy-focused boutique Intrepid Financial Partners. Three placement agents and advisory teams independently naming consolidation as a defining feature of the market are writing from inside a peer set that is, in real time, consolidating.

Heading into H2

None of this reads as a market losing momentum. If anything, the opposite: a market absorbing this much capital, this consistently, across GP-led and LP-led structures alike, is functioning as the private markets’ primary portfolio-management tool, not a peripheral or opportunistic one. What the first half actually shows is where that growth is concentrating: into secondaries specifically, then further into single-asset continuation funds, expanding into new asset classes, built on structures LP governance has not fully caught up with, and sold by an advisory market that is consolidating around fewer, bigger players even as it describes the trend to clients. Whatever H2 brings on the AI and tariff fronts both reports flag as live risks, those are the six threads worth tracking against.

_SOURCES

_{Asante Capital Group, Q2 2026 Market Pulse: It’s More Than Just Primary Fundraising These Days, June 2026.}

_{Jasmin Capital, Newsletter N°13/2026: Continuation Funds, Market Trends and Outlook, including interviews with David Arcauz (Flexstone Partners) and Milton Berlinski (Reverence Capital Partners), June 2026.}

_{William Blair Private Capital Advisory, Continued Bullishness Across Secondaries Despite More Macroeconomic Changes, Q2 2026 Quarterly Newsletter, June 2026.}

_{Kroll, “Secondary Market Evolution: Continuation Funds Emerge as a Viable Alternative to Traditional Exits,” March 2026.}

_{Preqin, co-investment and global deployment data, as of May to June 2026.}

Ahead of the Fourth of July: the world's largest single secondaries fund was raised in Paris. But the market itself, its dominant transaction volume, and most of its largest franchises are unmistakably American. What follows is the case for the U.S. as the center of gravity in private capital secondaries, and the one Parisian exception that proves the rule.

A market with a birth certificate

Most corners of private markets claim gradual, contested origins. Secondaries has an actual founding moment. In 1979, a financier named Dayton Carr (who died in 2020 at age 78) bought IBM’s limited partnership interests in a handful of venture capital funds, widely credited as the first LP secondary transaction on record. Three years later, Carr formalized the trade into a business, launching the Venture Capital Fund of America (VCFA) in 1982 with $6 million, the first fund dedicated entirely to buying up other people’s fund stakes.

At the time, there was no market to speak of. An LP that needed liquidity from a locked-up venture or buyout fund had essentially nowhere to go. VCFA created the counterparty that didn’t previously exist.

The rest of the 1980s filled out the founding roster, and this is where the U.S. story picks up its one durable rival: Pantheon launched one of the first dedicated secondary vehicles, Pantheon International Participations, out of London in 1988, and Coller Capitalwas founded in London a year later, in 1989. The same year, on the other side of the Atlantic, Landmark Partners was founded in Connecticut by Stanley Alfeld, John Griner, and Brent Nicklas, a firm that would go on to become one of the longest-running secondaries franchises in the industry before Ares acquired it in 2021.

So the honest version of the origin story is transatlantic from year one. What happened over the following four decades is what turned this into an American-led market: scale.

From back-office niche to portfolio management tool

For two decades, secondaries stayed a workaround, a market for distressed sellers, defaulting LPs, and funds nobody wanted to talk about. Annual volume didn’t reliably clear $1 billion until the 2000s. The market’s reputation problem (secondaries as a “signal of distress”) took root here and has taken Secondary Scoop’s entire editorial thesis to unwind.

Two shocks, both centered on U.S. institutional capital, changed that.

THE MECHANISM

The denominator effect, 2022. When public equities fell sharply in 2022, the private allocations sitting on U.S. pension, endowment, and foundation balance sheets, priced on a lag and marked more slowly, suddenly represented an outsized share of total portfolio value. Funds kept calling capital regardless. Institutions that found themselves over their private equity targets did the only thing they could do to rebalance without waiting for distributions: they sold fund stakes on the secondary market. That single dynamic, concentrated among America’s largest LPs, is broadly credited with pulling secondaries out of the niche and into the standard toolkit.

The second shock ran in the opposite direction, from GPs rather than LPs. Continuation vehicles, where a sponsor moves one or more portfolio companies into a new, purpose-built fund instead of selling them outright, first appeared in meaningful volume after the 2008 financial crisis, as GPs looked for ways to hold onto assets through a dead exit market. They stayed a niche, discount-heavy product through the 2010s. Then adoption inflected: single-asset continuation vehicle volume ran to roughly $70 billion between 2021 and 2023, more than three times the $21 billion transacted from 2018 to 2020. By 2025, nearly 80 percent of the top 100 sponsors globally by assets under management had completed at least one CV transaction, and GP-led deals reached $115 billion for the year, 48 percent of the total secondary market, up 53 percent year over year, according to Jefferies.

The market wasn’t handed liquidity by IPOs or strategic buyers. It built its own, and the largest pool of institutional capital and the largest inventory of aging private assets both happen to sit in the United States.

The scoreboard: who actually runs this market

Rank the industry by dedicated secondaries capital raised over the past five years, and one name sits above everyone else, and it isn’t American. Ardian, headquartered in Paris, closed Ardian Secondary Fund IX at $30 billion in 2023, the largest secondaries fund ever raised, and tops Secondaries Investor’s SI 50 ranking of the world’s largest firms. Any honest accounting of “who’s king” has to start by naming the exception.

Past that top line, though, the depth chart is overwhelmingly American.

_{Fund sizes reflect most recent publicly reported closes as of mid-2026; see sources below. Coller Capital (London) and Pantheon (London) remain major global players but are excluded here as non-U.S.-headquartered.}

Zoom out to the full SI 50 ranking and the pattern holds: the top 50 secondaries firms collectively raised $522.5 billion between 2020 and 2024, and a clear majority of that capital sits with U.S.-headquartered managers, even with Ardian at the very top of the list.

WHY THE VOLUME FOLLOWS THE FLAG

Capital raised by U.S. managers is one measure. Where the deals actually happen is another, and it’s less ambiguous: North American funds represented 80 percent of global secondary transaction volume in 2024, up from 68 percent in 2023, per Jefferies’ Private Capital Advisory group. Three structural facts explain why that share sits where it does.

• The asset base is American-sized. U.S. private equity alone generated $1.1 trillion in deal activity across more than 8,200 transactions in 2025, and the U.S. PE universe now holds upward of 13,000 portfolio companies — about eight years of inventory at the current pace of exits, with 30 percent of companies aged seven years or older. Buyout funds globally are sitting on a record $3.8 trillion of unrealized value; a disproportionate share of that overhang is American, because the American buyout market is simply larger than any other. More aging NAV means more that eventually needs to trade.

• The LP base is the deepest and most price-insensitive in the world. U.S. public pensions, university endowments, and foundations built the largest, longest-tenured institutional allocations to private equity anywhere — which is precisely the base that generated the 2022 denominator-effect selling wave and continues to generate the largest, most routine LP-led portfolio sales today.

• The wealth channel innovation is happening here first. Franklin Templeton and Lexington Partners launched the first registered tender-offer private equity secondaries fund built for the U.S. wealth channel, part of a broader ‘40-Act evergreen fund wave that pulled retail and semi-liquid capital into the market. Evergreen vehicles brought in an estimated $113 billion of inflows in 2025 alone, with roughly 41 percent of that allocated to secondaries strategies — a distribution channel U.S. asset managers built first and still dominate.

CONTEXT

None of this erases the European side of the ledger. Ardian’s scale, Coller’s five-decade track record, and Pantheon’s founding role all sit outside the U.S. And Secondary Scoop’s own editorial focus runs toward European market dynamics for good reason — CV activity, LP-led volume, and fundraising are all scaling faster off a smaller base in Europe than in the U.S. right now. But scaling faster off a smaller base is not the same as leading. On raw transaction volume, LP depth, and franchise count, the U.S. remains the market’s center of gravity, and has been since Dayton Carr bought IBM’s fund stakes in 1979.

The independence angle

There’s a version of this story that fits the holiday without straining for it. Private equity’s entire liquidity model was historically dependent on two exits it didn’t control: the IPO window and the M&A cycle. Both are set by public market sentiment, interest rates, and buyer appetite — conditions no GP or LP can engineer. What the U.S. secondaries market did, starting with a single trade in 1979 and compounding through four decades of institutional adoption, was build a third exit route that private capital controls on its own terms. That’s not a distress mechanism. It’s the industry declaring liquidity independence from public markets — a distinctly American origin story for a genuinely global tool.

This is our first structured pass at a H1 2026 balance: eighteen continuation vehicles (eight in Europe, ten across the rest of the world), ten dedicated secondaries funds (two European, eight elsewhere), and four LP-led portfolio sales (one European-asset, three elsewhere), compiled deal-by-deal from primary sources, law firm announcements and trade press, then cross-checked against major buyers’ own disclosures. It is not exhaustive, Secondaries Investor’s own paywalled Q1 log alone counted 27 CV closes in the first three months of the year, but it is verifiable, and it is enough to draw some lines.

Credit’s coming-out half

Start with the vehicles themselves. In Europe, Arcmont Asset Management’s $2.5 billion credit continuation vehicle, backed by Ares Credit Secondaries and closed in April, was billed by its own advisers as the largest European credit CV to date. In the U.S., Crescent Capital Group’s $3.2 billion Credit Solutions VII, led by Pantheon with Allianz Global Investors co-leading, went one better, and was marketed as the largest private credit CV of any kind to date. Antares Capital closed its second Ares-led credit CV at $1.7 billion in March. Audax Private Debt closed a $1 billion direct-lending CV with Pantheon in May. Coller Capital itself led a $1.3 billion credit CV on Ares’s 2018-vintage U.S. Direct Lending fund in February.

Add it up and disclosed credit CVs outsized disclosed equity CVs in both regions this half. That is not a rounding error. It is the clearest evidence yet that the credit secondaries market, long treated as PE’s smaller, quieter cousin, has caught up on deal size within the space of about eighteen months.

The fundraising data tells the same story from the buy side. Ares Management’s inaugural Ares Credit Secondaries Fund closed at $7.1 billion including leverage in January, which Ares describes as the largest dedicated institutional credit secondaries fund globally by LP equity commitments. That is larger than every other dedicated secondaries fund we tracked this half except Coller’s flagship.

Credit secondaries used to be the vehicle you built once you’d exhausted the equity playbook. In H1 2026, credit CVs are outsizing the equity deals in the same league tables.

EUROPE’S CONTINUATION VEHICLES, H1 2026

REST OF WORLD CONTINUATION VEHICLES, H1 2026

Europe’s paradox: deep deal flow, shallow fundraising

Flip to the buy side and Europe looks almost inverted. Eight CVs closed or landed in the market across Spain, the U.K., France, Switzerland, the Nordics and Germany this half, a genuinely diversified spread by geography and sector, from frozen dough in Catalonia to UPS manufacturing on the Swiss border to childcare in the U.K. But only two dedicated European secondaries funds registered any real fundraising milestone in the same window, and one of those, CVC Secondary Partners’ Secondary Opportunities Fund VI, had not even reached final close as of its Q1 update, sitting at $8.7 billion against a $7 billion target, with the close pushed into the second half.

The other is Coller Capital’s Coller International Partners IX, which closed at $17 billion in January, the firm’s largest fund ever and, on the numbers we tracked, the largest single vehicle of any kind raised in H1 2026, CV or fund, anywhere. One number does a lot of work here: Coller alone raised roughly as much in six months as the entire rest-of-world fund cohort we tracked combined.

EUROPE: DEDICATED SECONDARIES FUNDS, H1 2026

REST OF WORLD: DEDICATED SECONDARIES FUNDS, H1 2026

The buyer base is quietly getting wider

The most interesting story in the fund data may be the one furthest from the headline numbers. Alongside the usual megafunds, H1 2026 produced three closes that would barely have registered five years ago: Patria Investments’ $677 million fifth secondaries fund, dedicated entirely to Latin America; Kline Hill Partners and Cendana Capital’s $400 million second fund, built specifically for seed-stage venture LP stakes; and Argosy Capital’s $145 million Strategic Partners III, which writes cheques as small as $100,000 into small-deal secondaries that larger platforms don’t bother chasing.

None of these will move the league tables. All three matter for the same reason: they show the secondaries toolkit, LP stake sales, GP-leds, structured liquidity, being adapted to markets and check sizes that the Collers and Ardians of the world were never built to serve. Latin America, seed-stage venture and sub-$10 million deals are not adjacent markets discovering secondaries for the first time; they are proof that the mechanism has become generic enough to travel.

The other side of the ledger: LPs cash out

CVs and dedicated funds are the buy-side and sponsor-side of the secondaries trade. The seller side, LPs choosing to sell fund stakes rather than wait for a distribution, had its own H1 2026, and it was smaller and messier to track than either of the above, precisely because so many of the largest processes were still in the market rather than closed.

The cleanest data point is also the most American: CalPERS closed a $2.3–3 billion LP-led portfolio sale in early February, with Lexington Partners and Partners Group among the buyers, continuing a run of sales the pension giant has made a habit of since adopting a total portfolio approach. The University of California followed in March, shopping a $3 billion LP portfolio of its own, still in the market as of our cutoff. Singapore’s GIC has reportedly been testing appetite since October 2025 for a sale of up to $1–3 billion across roughly 30 fund positions, mostly 2016-vintage Blackstone, Apollo and TDR Capital commitments; no confirmed 2026 close had surfaced by 30 June.

Europe’s clearest entry is an odd one: CPP Investments, a Canadian pension giant, agreeing in May to sell its remaining interests in a European non-performing loan portfolio to a joint venture between Arrow Global and Fortress Investment Group for roughly C$1 billion. It is a reminder that “European secondaries” increasingly means European assets changing hands between non-European institutions as often as it means European sellers, and that credit and real-asset secondaries are broadening the definition of what counts as an LP sale in the first place.

EUROPE (ASSET-FOCUS): LP-LED SECONDARIES TRANSACTIONS, H1 2026

REST OF WORLD: LP-LED SECONDARIES TRANSACTIONS, H1 2026

The house view

Put the five tables side by side and H1 2026 reads less like a single trend than three running in parallel. Credit secondaries, both the vehicles and the funds that buy into them, have grown from a subplot into a competing storyline, with the single largest CV (Crescent, $3.2bn) and the single largest dedicated fund apart from Coller’s flagship (Ares, $7.1bn) both credit plays. Europe’s deal pipeline is wide and increasingly varied by sector, even as its fund-formation calendar sits mostly idle until the region’s next vintage cycle turns over. And underneath both of those stories, a longer tail of specialist buyers: regional, strategy-specific, deliberately small, is proving that the continuation vehicle is no longer a mega-cap phenomenon looking for smaller imitators. Meanwhile the sell side shows the mirror image: it is the giant, generalist LPs: CalPERS, the University of California, GIC, doing the confirmed selling this half, even as the market talks endlessly about endowments. It is infrastructure now, and infrastructure gets used by whoever needs it, on both sides of the trade.

That is consistent with where this publication has stood since its first issue: secondaries are a portfolio management tool, not a distress signal. H1 2026’s numbers are the clearest evidence yet that the market agrees.

^METHODOLOGY

^{Continuation vehicles, dedicated secondaries funds and LP-led portfolio sales were identified through primary press releases, law firm and adviser announcements, and trade coverage (Secondaries Investor, PE Hub, AltAssets, Alternative Credit Investor, Bloomberg and others), then classified by sponsor/target geography for CVs, by manager headquarters for funds, and by underlying asset geography (noted where it differs from seller domicile) for LP sales. Deals are included where a launch, interim close or final close fell within 1 January–30 June 2026; two European CVs (CapVest/Curium, Ardian/EWE), two funds (CVC’s SOF VI, Northleaf’s fourth vehicle) and two LP sales (University of California, GIC) are flagged as not yet finally closed or confirmed as of this writing. This dataset is a verified sample, not a census: Secondaries Investor’s own subscription-gated Q1 2026 CV Deal Log alone counted 27 closes in the first quarter. No confirmed, named Asia-Pacific or Middle East continuation vehicle or dedicated secondaries fund close was identified in open sources for this period, and reported endowment sale processes (Yale, Harvard) were excluded as unconfirmed within the window.}

_{Sources: Ardian, Coller Capital, CVC Capital Partners, Ares Management, Arcmont Asset Management, Crescent Capital Group, Antares Capital, Audax Private Debt, Cerberus Capital Management, Onex Partners, Align Capital Partners, Partners Group, Avenue Capital Group, HarbourVest Partners, Apogem Capital, Future Standard, Northleaf Capital Partners, Patria Investments, Kline Hill Partners, Argosy Capital, Fremman Capital, Latour Capital, MCH Private Equity, Eurazeo, Verdane, CapVest Partners, CPP Investments, CalPERS, University of California, GIC; Secondaries Investor, PE Hub, AltAssets, Alternative Credit Investor, Alternatives Watch, Bloomberg, ION Analytics (Infralogic, Mergermarket), Global SWF, DealStreetAsia, Kirkland & Ellis, Goodwin, Hogan Lovells, Davis Polk.}

This is not a niche product anymore. CVs have become a structural feature of how private equity manages portfolios and delivers, or defers, liquidity. And yet, the market’s rapid expansion has outpaced the governance frameworks designed to protect the LPs who must decide, repeatedly and under time pressure, whether to sell or roll.

ILPA’s newly released 2026 Continuation Vehicle Guidance (open to comments until August 5th) is the industry’s most serious attempt yet to close that gap. It is also, notably, a document whose timing is not accidental.

Why the Market Got Here

The structural driver is not complicated: too much capital, held too long, generating too little cash. The stock of unrealized assets across global private equity portfolios has reached approximately $3.8 trillion, roughly 32,000 companies. Holding periods at exit are now hovering around seven years, up from five to six years in the prior cycle. For the critical 2018–2021 fund vintages, which should currently be in their peak harvest period, DPI levels are reportedly as low as 0.1x to 0.3x.

“DPI has overtaken IRR as the metric that drives LP re-up decisions. Managers who can’t show progress toward at least 1.5x paid-in capital by year eight face a difficult fundraising conversation, regardless of the unrealized value generated.”

Against that backdrop, the cumulative LP cash flow deficit has reached $260 billion since 2022, according to Carlyle AlpInvest’s analysis. Distributions have recovered somewhat from their 2023 lows but remain roughly half the levels investors became accustomed to in prior cycles. The practical consequence: LPs are capital-constrained precisely as they face a wave of GP fundraising asks and, increasingly, CV sell-or-roll decisions.

GPs, meanwhile, have found CVs to be a genuinely useful tool in this environment. They allow high-conviction assets to be held longer without forcing a distressed sale. They offer LP optionality, cash out or roll, rather than a binary fund liquidation. And, critically, they allow carry to crystallize and be redeployed into succession planning. According to Bain’s 2026 Midyear PE Report, GP-led CVs grew 62% year-over-year, and 37% annually since 2022. Roughly 25% of GPs have recently launched or completed a CV; about 40% expect to explore one in the next one to two years.

The problem is that growth at this speed and scale, in a product that is, by definition, a related-party transaction, has created documented friction between GPs and their LPs.

LP Sentiment: Structural, Not Cyclical

The Coller Capital Summer 2026 Barometer, the 44th edition of the survey, published June 24, provides the clearest read on where LPs actually stand. The findings are striking, and not in the way CV optimists would hope.

The data point that matters most: 69% of LPs expect CV activity to either increase or hold at current levels, even as traditional exits recover. This is not a temporary workaround. It is a permanent feature of the private equity landscape. LPs know this, which is precisely why governance matters so much. CVs are not going away. The question is whether the processes around them will be made fair.

The same Barometer documented mounting LP concerns about process quality: inconsistent and late disclosures, compressed election windows, and transactions initiated without credible commercial rationale. A separate April 2026 ILPA poll found that a majority of LPs begin to lose confidence in a GP when the discount to the last reported mark exceeds 5% on a full exit — a threshold that many CVs have tested. These are not abstract complaints. They are the conditions that created demand for exactly the kind of framework ILPA has now produced.

The ILPA Response: From Principles to Enforcement

ILPA’s 2023 guidance established principles. The 2026 update operationalizes them. The shift in tone is deliberate and significant.

The document opens with a statement that sets the frame for everything that follows: CVs are “perceived overuse or misuse as an exit mechanism, often initiated with little to no disclosed commercial rationale, coupled with inconsistent and late disclosures, and processes that fail to represent a commitment to GP alignment with existing fund limited partners.” This is not a hedged observation. It is an indictment of a pattern of behavior that has become common enough to require a structural response.

The guidance is organized around three non-negotiable principles:

Each of these principles addresses a specific failure mode that has become common in practice. The “deliberate not default” standard targets CVs launched because the exit environment was difficult, not because the GP had a compelling case for continued ownership. The “no worse off” principle targets fee and carry structures that incrementally disadvantaged rolling LPs. The information symmetry standard targets the scenario, frequently reported by LPs, where new CV investors received better diligence access than the existing LP base being asked to make a sell-or-roll decision.

The Conflicts Section Is the Sharpest Part

On conflicts of interest, the guidance takes its clearest stand. The central problem of a CV is structural: the GP is simultaneously the selling agent (representing the existing fund) and the buying agent (managing the new CV). This cannot be eliminated. But, ILPA argues, it can be properly disclosed and managed, and the burden is entirely on the GP to do so.

The guidance’s most consequential line: “GPs should not rely on any pre-clearance conflict waivers in LPAs.” Every conflict must be identified, disclosed, and brought to the LPAC for explicit approval, regardless of what the fund documents technically permit. This is a direct rejection of the practice, increasingly common as CVs proliferated, of GPs treating LPA pre-clearance provisions as a shortcut around substantive conflict management.

“A GP should not assume its LPAC will always waive CV transactional conflicts. If processes are poorly managed, suffer from incomplete or delayed information, or overly compressed timelines, there is a greater risk that an LPAC will reject or condition its clearing of conflicts.”

The guidance also addresses an increasingly common conflict that has received little formal attention: LPAC members whose affiliated secondaries businesses are independently bidding on the CV. These members sit at the intersection of multiple conflicts, as LP fiduciaries, as potential buyers, and as LPAC gatekeepers for the very transaction they’re evaluating commercially. The guidance makes clear this must be managed separately, with full disclosure and appropriate recusal where warranted.

Regulators are watching. The SEC and the UK Financial Conduct Authority have both intensified scrutiny of GP conflicts in GP-led transactions. ILPA’s guidance effectively pre-empts regulatory intervention by setting an industry standard, but that standard now also serves as a reference point for regulatory expectations.

The Companion Documents: Where Principle Becomes Practice

Three supporting documents give the guidance operational weight in ways that prior ILPA publications did not achieve.

The GP Checklist for LPs converts the guidance into a yes/no disclosure framework that GPs are expected to complete at each stage of the CV process-covering commercial rationale, conflicts, pricing methodology, election mechanics, and LP rights. In practice, this is a document LPs can put in front of a GP at the outset of any CV process and request completed answers before the election clock starts.

The LP Evaluation Questionnaire structures the sell-or-roll decision across four dimensions: process integrity (was a competitive bid run? were advisors conflicted?), economics and valuation (does the price reflect a fairness opinion? how has the multiple trended quarter-over-quarter?), structure and terms (do existing side letters transfer? what are the carry and fee implications on an annualized basis?), and alignment (is 100% of crystallized carry rolling? is portfolio company management participating?).

The CV Transaction Timeline maps the ideal process from initial GP portfolio review through LPAC engagement, bid process, election, and closing. It establishes a critical sequencing principle: LP notification must begin at the moment the GP first incurs CV advisory costs, not once the transaction is substantially structured and the timeline is compressed.

LP MINIMUM STANDARDS - KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE GUIDANCE

• Require the fully completed ILPA Disclosure Template before the election period begins

• Demand no less than 30 business days for the election window, with unrestricted data room access throughout

• Confirm that existing side letters transfer to the CV on equivalent or better terms

• Verify that management fee and carry structures leave rolling LPs no worse off in absolute terms

• Require an anonymized summary of all final-round bids, including pricing structure and key commercial terms

• Confirm crystallized carry and GP sponsor commitment returns are reinvested in the CV

• Ensure roll elections are not conditioned on minimum commitments or stapled financing

• Request independent third-party price validation and a fairness opinion

What Changes and What Doesn’t

ILPA’s guidance is best practices, not regulation. No GP is legally compelled to follow it. But that framing understates its practical significance in several ways.

First, the document now serves as a reference standard in LPAC negotiations. LPs who arrive at an LPAC meeting with ILPA’s checklist and a list of gaps to fill have a credible, industry-endorsed framework behind them. GPs who deviate from it must explain why, which is a substantially higher bar than the prior norm of simply presenting a CV on whatever terms the GP preferred.

Second, LPAC dynamics have shifted. The guidance explicitly empowers LPACs to condition conflict approval on process remediation, on better information, longer timelines, clearer rationale. An LPAC that uses this authority is not being obstructionist; it is following published best-practice guidance. That changes the politics inside these transactions.

Third, the regulatory environment is moving in the same direction. Both the SEC and the FCA have signaled increased focus on GP-led transaction conflicts. ILPA’s guidance effectively creates an industry compliance baseline that regulators can reference, and that GPs ignore at their own risk.

For GPs, the practical implication is front-loaded investment. Early LPAC engagement, earlier LP notification, fuller documentation of alternatives considered, and a standing CV policy shared with LPs during fundraising. The guidance signals that the era of launching a CV with limited commercial context and a compressed election window is structurally over, not because it will always be stopped, but because the friction and reputational cost of doing so will increasingly outweigh the convenience.

For LPs, the guidance provides both a minimum standard and a negotiating tool. The side letter implications are particularly important: LPs should now incorporate minimum CV election periods, mirror reporting requirements, information-sharing floors, and mirror tax treatment into their standard side letter templates for future commitments. The time to negotiate these protections is during fundraising, not when the CV process is already underway.

The Structural Bet

The 2026 guidance arrives at a moment when the continuation vehicle market is, by most projections, still in its growth phase. Projections from multiple sources suggest CVs could represent 30% to 40% of all private equity exits within two years. The $3.8 trillion backlog of unrealized assets is not clearing quickly, and for the 2018–2021 vintages under the most LP pressure, CVs remain one of the few mechanisms that can return capital without forced sale conditions.

The Coller Barometer data points to why this matters beyond the immediate cycle: 69% of LPs expect CV activity to hold or increase even as exit markets recover. This is not a market expecting CVs to revert to a niche use case once conditions normalize. It is a market pricing in CVs as a permanent feature of how private equity works, and adjusting its governance expectations accordingly.

ILPA’s 2026 guidance is, in that sense, not just a response to current market conditions. It is the industry’s attempt to build the institutional infrastructure, standards, checklists, templates, timelines, that a permanent, high-volume CV market requires to function with genuine LP-GP alignment rather than the adversarial friction that has characterized too many transactions in the recent cycle.

The comment period closes August 5, 2026. Both LPs and GPs have until then to shape the final version. Given what’s at stake, the participation rate should be high.

_{Sources: ILPA 2026 Continuation Vehicle Guidance (comment period draft); Coller Capital Global Private Capital Barometer, 44th Edition, Summer 2026; Bain & Company Private Equity Midyear Report 2026; Carlyle AlpInvest, Global Private Markets Quarterly; Lazard 2025 Secondary Market Report; Ares Management secondaries research. Market volume data from Jefferies and Lazard annual secondary market reviews. All figures in USD unless otherwise noted. This article reflects analysis and editorial interpretation by Secondary Scoop; it does not constitute investment advice.}

The secondaries market has, over the past decade, developed a working vocabulary for itself. LP-led transactions, fund stake sales driven by limited partners seeking liquidity, are described as diversified, discount-driven, and reliable. GP-led transactions, continuation vehicles through which general partners transfer assets into new structures, are positioned as concentrated, compounding, and return-driven. The shorthand that has taken hold: LP-leds are private markets beta. GP-leds are private markets alpha. It is a framework Ares Management lays out explicitly in a recent perspective piece on the GP-led market.

But the framework papers over a structural mechanic in GP-led deals that the alpha/beta analogy doesn’t fully capture, and that may be one of the more underappreciated sources of return in the asset class.

The Framework, and Why It Holds

The alpha/beta distinction maps reasonably well onto how the two deal types actually work. In LP-led secondaries, a buyer acquires a diversified portfolio of fund stakes, often dozens to hundreds of underlying companies, at a discount to net asset value. Returns are driven primarily by that entry discount, the passage of time, and the realization of assets already in the ground. The buyer is not selecting individual companies; they are acquiring exposure to a broadly constructed portfolio and capturing the gap between purchase price and fair value.

GP-led continuation vehicles work differently. A general partner selects one or multiple assets, typically those it views as having substantial remaining upside, and transfers them into a new vehicle, giving existing LPs the choice to roll their position or take cash. New secondary buyers enter at a price set to the current NAV. There is no diversification by design. The return is driven by the long-term compounding of the underlying asset, not the entry discount. The buyer is making a concentrated, underwritten bet on a specific business.

LP-leds give you exposure to what private equity has already built. GP-leds give you exposure to what a GP still believes it can build. One is a claim on the past. The other is a wager on the future.

The distinction matters for portfolio construction. An LP allocating to both segments is not doubling down on secondaries, they are accessing two structurally different return profiles that happen to sit within the same asset class label. Combined, they offer multiple drivers of return that can be weighted depending on where the market environment favors entry discounts versus compounding.

The Mechanic the Model Misses

Within the GP-led segment, there is a specific structural feature that distinguishes continuation vehicles from both LP-led secondaries and direct private equity investments, and that is only recently beginning to receive consistent attention from buyers.

In a conventional M&A transaction, there is a gap between the date a deal is signed and the date it closes. During that period, which can run from weeks to several months, the target company continues to operate. Revenue is generated, EBITDA accumulates, contracts are signed. The company keeps creating value. In a standard M&A deal, the seller retains the economic benefit of that interim value creation: the purchase price is fixed at closing, and the seller captures whatever happens between signing and close.

Continuation vehicles are structured differently. In a GP-led deal, the purchase price is set to the net asset value at signing, not at closing. Any value created between signing and closing, operating performance, multiple expansion, debt paydown, accrues to the buyer. It is a built-in return enhancement that does not appear in the initial underwriting model, because it cannot be predicted with precision at the time of signing.

This is not a theoretical benefit. It is a systematic structural advantage that accrues in every GP-led deal where the underlying business performs during the closing period. The buyer does not need to underwrite it — it arrives automatically. The only scenario in which it cuts the other way is if the business deteriorates between signing and closing, in which case the loss also accrues to the buyer. The mechanic is bilateral, but in a portfolio of assets selected for their growth trajectory, the asymmetry historically favors the buyer.

Adoption Has Made This a Structural Feature, Not a Cycle

The practical significance of both the alpha framing and the signing-to-closing mechanic depends on whether GP-led secondaries remain a meaningful part of the private equity exit landscape. The data suggests they have become one.

These numbers tell a story about normalized adoption rather than cyclical demand. Continuation vehicles initially expanded in 2022–2023, when traditional exit routes (IPOs, M&A) contracted sharply and GPs needed alternatives to generate LP liquidity. The intuitive expectation was that CV volume would recede once conventional exits recovered. It has not. Even as global M&A activity surpassed $5 trillion in 2025, GP-led secondaries continued to grow. When 83% of the top 100 global buyout sponsors have accessed the CV market at least once, it is no longer reasonable to describe the instrument as niche or opportunistic.

The exit market share figure is particularly significant. CVs now account for 16% of total private equity exit value, up from 5% just five years ago. That is not a rounding error in the PE exit landscape. It is a structural shift in how large private equity firms manage the tail of their portfolios and deliver liquidity to LPs without sacrificing positions they believe have room to run.

What the Alpha Label Gets Wrong

The alpha/beta framework is analytically useful but carries a risk of oversimplification. Alpha, in the conventional sense, implies skill-driven outperformance against a benchmark. Applied to GP-led secondaries, it suggests that buyers of CVs are generating returns through superior asset selection. That is partially true, underwriting a single-asset continuation vehicle requires genuine bottom-up diligence on a specific business, its management team, competitive dynamics, and exit path.

But the signing-to-closing mechanic is not alpha in that sense. It is a structural feature of how the transaction is priced. It does not require skill to access, it accrues automatically to any buyer who closes a GP-led deal. It is, in effect, a systematic return enhancement embedded in the structure of every continuation vehicle, invisible at the time of underwriting and unattributable to any particular analytical insight.

The implication is that part of what the market labels as "GP-led alpha" is better understood as structural return-return that derives from transaction architecture rather than from picking the right asset. That distinction matters for how buyers should think about the asset class: the floor of expected return in a well-selected GP-led portfolio is higher than the model suggests, not because the underwriter was conservative, but because the structure delivers value the model cannot fully price.

Part of what gets labeled GP-led alpha is structural, not analytical. The deal architecture delivers returns that the underwriting model never counted.

Some Extra Thoughts

The alpha/beta framework gives secondaries investors a useful shorthand for portfolio construction. It captures something real: LP-leds and GP-leds are not the same instrument, and treating them as interchangeable because both sit inside "secondaries" misses the different risk/return profiles on offer.

But the framework is incomplete as a description of where GP-led returns actually originate. The signing-to-closing mechanic is a structural return source that sits below the analytical layer, it does not depend on picking the right asset, only on being a buyer in a correctly structured GP-led transaction. Combined with the normalized adoption of CVs as a mainstream PE exit tool (16% of PE exit value, 83% of top-100 sponsors), the structural dimension of GP-led returns is likely to compound over time as deal volumes grow and the mechanic repeats across a larger pool of transactions.

The better mental model is this: GP-led secondaries offer two return streams: one analytical (asset selection, growth underwriting, exit timing) and one structural (the signing-to-closing enhancement). The alpha label captures the first. It misses the second entirely.

_{Sources. Market data and the signing-to-closing mechanic described in this article draw on Ares Management's June 2026 perspective "Why Now for GP-Led Secondaries." GP-led market share and volume figures cited from Evercore Private Capital Advisory 2025 Secondary Market Highlights (January 2026). CV share of PE exit value from Morgan Stanley FY 2025 Investor Survey and LSEG sponsor-backed exit data (May 2026). Top-100 sponsor adoption figure references Private Equity International rankings, as cited by Ares Management. Return projections and loss ratio comparisons are Ares Management's own figures and carry standard forward-looking statement disclaimers; they are cited as market color, not as independently verified benchmarks. All analysis and editorial framing are Secondary Scoop's own.}

That figure, compiled from MSCI Burgiss data and cited as proprietary Carlyle AlpInvest analysis, encompasses buyout, growth equity, and venture capital. It represents four years of a distribution drought that has quietly restructured the economics of every institutional LP portfolio in the world. And it is the single most important number for understanding why the secondaries market is not in a cyclical boom. It is in a structural one.

How We Got Here

The mechanics are straightforward. Private equity funds operate on a fundamental promise: LPs commit capital, the GP deploys it into companies, those companies are exited over a 5–7 year horizon, and cash flows back. The system works when exits flow. It breaks when they don’t.

From 2022 onward, exits stalled. Rising interest rates compressed multiples. M&A markets slowed. The IPO window narrowed. GPs holding assets acquired at peak 2021 valuations found themselves unable to exit at acceptable prices. Distributions as a percentage of NAV, the metric LPs use to gauge how much cash their PE portfolios are actually returning, fell from a long-term average of roughly 20–25% of NAV to between 10–15%. The Carlyle AlpInvest report puts it precisely: distributions have remained “significantly depressed,” with the most recent full-year figure at 12% of NAV for global PE and 13% for buyout-only.

The gap between what LPs expected and what they received is not small. StepStone’s 2026 House Views put it at 0.2x DPI below budget for 2018–2021 vintages. McKinsey’s 2025 Global Private Markets Report found that 2.5 times as many LPs now rank DPI as their “most critical” performance metric compared to three years ago. The message from the LP community has been consistent: we need our money back.

But here is what matters: even as exits have modestly recovered in 2025 and into early 2026, the $260 billion hole has not closed. It has only stopped growing at the same pace. A sustained return to the 20–25% distribution rate, what would constitute a normalized exit environment, is a multi-year project, not a quarterly event.

Why the Deficit Is the Secondaries Story

Secondary market volumes are usually reported as a function of deal flow: how many portfolios came to market, what advisors ran processes, which buyers closed. What gets underreported is the demand-side pressure that creates that supply in the first place.

LPs sell fund stakes in the secondary market for many reasons. Portfolio rebalancing. Manager consolidation. Capital redeployment into new vintages. Administrative cleanup. But the dominant force since 2022 has been simpler: they need cash that their PE portfolios are not generating. The cumulative $260 billion deficit is a direct measure of that unmet need.

CARLYLE ALPINVEST GPMQ Q2 2026

The critical implication is this: as long as the deficit exists, the structural supply of secondary deal flow persists. Even if M&A markets fully reopen, even if IPO volumes recover, even if exit multiples continue their recent upward trend, the four-year backlog of unreturned capital does not disappear overnight. It takes years of above-average distributions to close a gap of this magnitude.

Carlyle AlpInvest puts the math plainly: buyout LPs alone are $89 billion net out of pocket since 2022. Adding growth equity and venture brings the figure to $260 billion. For context, the entire secondary market transacted $205 billion in 2025, its record year. The unmet distribution need is larger than the biggest year the market has ever had.

The Exit Recovery Doesn’t Change the Calculus

The natural counterargument is that improving exit markets will reduce secondary supply pressure. If GPs can exit more assets, distributions improve, LPs get their cash back, and the need to sell fund stakes diminishes. This view has been increasingly common as exit multiples have recovered, Carlyle AlpInvest’s proprietary data shows median exit EBITDA multiples for Q3 and Q4 2025 exits reaching 14.8x–15.5x, up sharply from the 11.0x–13.0x range that characterized much of 2022–2024.

The problem is the arithmetic. Even at improved exit rates, working through the backlog of unreturned capital requires sustained above-average distributions across an entire vintage cohort. Bain & Co’s June 2026 data shows PE firms sitting on over 30,000 unsold portfolio companies. Carlyle AlpInvest notes that a sustained rise in exit multiples will be needed to clear the backlog of high-priced pandemic-era deals, and that is before accounting for the interest rate environment, the SaaS valuation reset still working through credit portfolios, and the continuing uncertainty from geopolitical disruption.

The Dry Powder Signal No One Is Talking About

There is a second number in the Carlyle AlpInvest report that compounds the deficit story: dry powder for secondaries now represents less than one year of deal volume. For a market that transacted $205 billion in 2025 and is tracking toward $300 billion annually within 24 months according to Jefferies, this is a meaningful constraint.

Ropes & Gray’s Q1 2026 Secondaries Update puts secondary fundraising projections at $130–145 billion for the full year from Campbell Lutyens, with Evercore estimating over $200 billion to be raised over the next 12 months. Even the upper end of those estimates barely keeps pace with projected deal flow. Secondary buyers, not sellers, are the binding constraint in the current market.

This is not a conventional market dynamic. In most asset classes, rising volumes attract capital, which compresses returns, which moderates supply. In secondaries, the supply driver, the LP cash flow deficit, is not price-sensitive. LPs selling fund stakes to manage liquidity will continue doing so regardless of whether buyers price aggressively or conservatively. The supply is structural. The capital constraint is the variable.

What This Means for the Market

Several implications follow from taking the $260 billion deficit seriously as a long-duration structural force rather than a cyclical distortion.

First, secondary market volumes are unlikely to revert to pre-2022 levels even in an improved exit environment. The distribution gap took four years to accumulate and will take multiple years of above-average exit activity to close. In the interim, LP portfolio management via secondaries becomes a permanent feature, not a crisis response.

Second, the buyer’s market dynamic described in Carlyle AlpInvest’s Q1 2026 data, younger, higher-quality assets coming to market as LPs optimize portfolios for price, is a sign of a maturing LP seller base, not a softening market. Sophisticated LPs have internalized secondaries as a tool. The first-time sellers who drove much of 2023–2024 supply are being joined by repeat sellers managing portfolios strategically.

Third, the undercapitalization of the buyer side relative to deal flow creates structural alpha opportunity for well-capitalized, relationship-driven secondary platforms. With dry powder below one year of volume, buyers with established GP relationships and the ability to move quickly on complex transactions will extract better pricing than the crowded 2021–2022 vintage suggested.

Fourth, the distribution deficit reframes the GP-led story. Continuation vehicles are not primarily a mechanism for GPs to hold trophy assets, they are a response to LPs who need partial liquidity now without exiting entirely. The roll-or-cash-out election is structurally driven by the same deficit that drives LP-led supply. The two sides of the secondaries market are both expressions of the same underlying imbalance.

The Secondary Scoop Read

The secondaries market is frequently covered as a volume story. Record years, record transaction sizes, record fundraises. What the volume story misses is causality: why are records being set, and how durable is the driver?

The $260 billion cumulative LP cash flow deficit is the answer. It is not a market anomaly. It is a four-year structural accumulation of unmet distribution expectations across the entire institutional LP base, pensions, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, that cannot be resolved quickly even under optimistic exit scenarios.

Until that hole is filled, the secondary market has structural tailwinds that do not depend on macro conditions, interest rate cycles, or the health of any single exit route. The records are not a coincidence. They are arithmetic.

^SOURCES

• ^{Carlyle AlpInvest, Global Private Markets Quarterly Q2 2026 (data as of March 31, 2026; proprietary Carlyle AlpInvest data and MSCI Burgiss, April 2026)}

• ^{StepStone Group, Private Equity 2026 House Views; StepStone / Fidelity Q&A, Institutional Investor, May 2026}

• ^{Hamilton Lane, 2026 Market Overview, March 2026}

• ^{Jefferies Private Capital Advisory, 2025 Global Secondary Market Review, January 2026}

• ^{Campbell Lutyens, 2025 Secondaries Market Flash Report, January 2026}

• ^{Ropes & Gray, Secondaries Q1 2026 Update, March 2026}

• ^{Bain & Company, cited in InvestmentNews, June 24, 2026 (30,000+ unsold companies figure)}

• ^{PJT Partners, Q1 2026 Secondary Market Insight, April 2026 (cited in Carlyle AlpInvest GPMQ)}

Lexington Partners, one of the largest dedicated secondary buyers with over $84 billion in total capitalization, takes a different view. In a June 2026 research note on secondary transaction underwriting, the firm makes a direct argument against over-indexing on discount, and makes the case that the metric, applied without context, can actively mislead investors evaluating secondary funds.

WHY “MORE DISCOUNT” DOES NOT MEAN “BETTER VALUE”

The core of Lexington’s argument is straightforward: discount is the inverse of price, and price is a reflection of projected returns and asset quality. A very high discount, in their framing, frequently signals that an asset has limited upside, potentially low-quality, structurally challenged, or already fully valued at current NAV. These transactions offer fewer ways to win: the initial price is doing most of the work, and there is little appreciation potential to carry the investment forward.

TAYLOR ROBINSON, PARTNER, LEXINGTON PARTNERS

The firm’s position, developed over 35 years of secondary investing, is that the vast majority of value generated in secondary deals comes from asset appreciation, not from the entry discount itself. Discount, in their view, functions as an “insurance policy” against value erosion and a mitigant of private equity’s initial J-curve, but it should not be the primary driver of investment selection.

This distinction matters most when evaluating what Lexington calls the reliability of reported NAV. A uniform discount applied across a portfolio assumes that all NAVs are equally conservative, that valuation timing is consistent, and that growth prospects are comparable. In practice, none of those conditions reliably hold. Paying 90 cents on the dollar for a conservatively marked, high-growth portfolio may generate better outcomes than paying 80 cents for one that is fully valued or structurally challenged, even though the second deal looks “cheaper” on a headline basis.

WHAT LEXINGTON LOOKS FOR INSTEAD

The framework Lexington articulates in the paper centers on bottoms-up underwriting: starting from the underlying companies in a portfolio, assessing growth trajectory, leverage, exit optionality, and sponsor quality, before arriving at a price. The discount emerges from that process; it is not the input.

SECONDARY PRICING: WHAT ACTUALLY GOES INTO IT

• Asset underwriting and GP quality assessment

• Portfolio company growth outlook and leverage levels

• Exit optionality and capital markets receptivity

• Vintage year dynamics and sector cyclicality

• Unfunded commitment obligations

• Transaction structure, including deferred pricing mechanics

• Capital availability and competitive dynamics

The practical implication for investors evaluating secondary managers: Lexington suggests asking what unlevered returns a manager is presenting at investment committee, not what average discount they are targeting. The question reorients the conversation from entry mechanics to forward return expectations, which is where actual value creation is measured.

THE STRUCTURAL SHIFT BEHIND THE ARGUMENT: GP-LEDS AND DEFERRED PRICING

The discount debate does not exist in a vacuum. Two structural trends in the 2025 secondary market give it additional urgency.

First, GP-led transactions, which now represent a significant share of total secondary volume, price differently from LP-led deals. According to Lexington’s data, high-quality GP-led continuation vehicles are generally priced at or near par, sometimes at a premium. A CV pricing at a significant discount, in this framing, is more likely to reflect a challenged asset or a riskier value creation profile than a seller in distress offering a bargain. This inverts the assumption that discount equals safety in the GP-led segment specifically.

Second, deferred pricing structures have become widespread enough to distort headline discount figures. An estimated 23% of secondary transactions completed in 2025 included a deferred pricing component, according to the Jefferies Global Secondary Market Review. These arrangements, where a portion of the purchase price is paid at close and the remainder at a later date, allow sellers to show better optical pricing while buyers retain capital deployment flexibility. The effect is that reported “prices” in any given quarter may not reflect the economics that actually cleared.

THE NORMALIZATION SIGNAL: 60% OF 2025 SELLERS WERE REPEAT PARTICIPANTS

Alongside the discount argument, the paper contains a data point that speaks directly to how the secondary market has structurally evolved. In 2025, approximately 60% of LPs who sold in the secondary market were repeat sellers, and Lexington observed a meaningful increase in sellers accessing the market as part of a systematic, active portfolio management program rather than in response to a discrete liquidity need.

This matters for how buyers underwrite supply. A market where the majority of sellers are repeat, programmatic participants behaves differently from one driven by distress or opportunistic liquidations. It is more predictable, more efficiently priced, and increasingly competitive. It also reinforces the broader industry thesis, one that Secondary Scoop has tracked closely, that secondaries have moved from a niche liquidity mechanism to a standard portfolio management tool for institutional investors.

THE AI QUESTION

Lexington’s note also weighs in on AI’s role in secondary underwriting, with a framing that resists both dismissal and hype. The firm’s view is that AI meaningfully accelerates tops-down processes, aggregating information, scenario modeling, memo drafting, but does not substitute for the bottoms-up relational work that generates actual informational edge. The critical last mile of secondary underwriting, in their assessment, depends on direct dialogue with PE sponsors and the accumulated pattern recognition that comes from decades of repeat exposure to the same managers and assets.

The implication is pointed: firms that have recently entered the secondary market and are positioning AI as a core underwriting differentiator may be overstating what the technology can do in an environment where the most valuable information is not in any database.