The Secondaries Market Just Hit a Record High. Increasingly, the Buyer and the Seller Are the Same Firm.

Private capital’s secondaries market has just had its strongest half-year on record. Global secondaries volume reached $121bn (£91.5bn) in H1 2026, up 19% on the same period last year, and forecasters now expect the full year to land somewhere between $250bn and $260bn (£189bn–£197bn), beating 2025’s own record year, itself reported at anywhere from $220bn (£166bn) to $240bn (£181.5bn) depending on which tracker you follow, up as much as 48% on 2024. By any measure, this is one of the fastest-growing corners of private markets, and it would be easy to read the headline as confirmation that the exit backlog we’ve tracked through this series for several months is finally starting to clear.

Look at how that volume is actually made up, though, and a rather different story appears. For the first time on record, GP-led transactions have overtaken LP-led sales: $65bn (£49bn), or 54% of the total, against $56bn (£42bn) of LP-led activity, and the gap is widening quickly (GP-led volume up 35% year-on-year; LP-led up just 4%). LP-led secondaries are what most people picture when they hear the term: an existing investor sells its stake in a fund to another investor, a fairly conventional change of hands. GP-led deals are something else entirely. The fund manager who already runs the asset sets up a new vehicle, moves the asset (or a handful of assets) into it, and gives existing investors a choice: cash out now, at a price the manager itself has helped determine, or roll their position into the new vehicle and stay in. The manager doesn’t relinquish control. In most cases, it extends it, often by several more years.

A market pricing itself in two directions at once

Within GP-led deals, the fastest-growing segment by some distance is the single-asset continuation vehicle, where one specific, usually high-performing company is carved out into its own dedicated fund. These now account for around half of all GP-led volume and grew roughly 88% year-on-year. Crucially, they are pricing exceptionally well: at par, or as much as 14% above net asset value. Multi-asset, portfolio-style secondary sales are moving in the opposite direction; 71% of them priced below par, with discounts on standard buyout portfolios running 5–15% and stretching to 10–25% in weaker sectors. Venture secondaries sit furthest apart of all, typically trading at only 75–78% of NAV. Put simply: the assets a manager wants to keep are being priced like scarce, sought-after deals, while everything else is being priced like a clearance sale.

“The secondary market has transformed into an increasingly important component of private markets infrastructure.”

Nigel Dawn, Global Head of Private Capital Advisory, Evercore

Why the best assets never really leave

Why are the strongest single assets commanding a premium while almost everything else gets marked down? Partly, it’s a supply problem: secondary buyers raised roughly $95bn (£72bn) last year against an estimated $194bn (£147bn) of dry powder still waiting to be deployed, which sounds like plenty of firepower until you remember that demand is chasing a comparatively narrow pool of genuinely trophy assets rather than the secondaries market as a whole. And partly, it’s the same structural story we’ve been following through this series since August: the average private equity hold period has already stretched to 7.2 years, up from around five in 2016, precisely because trade sales and IPOs remain constrained routes to a genuine exit. A continuation vehicle lets a manager sidestep that constraint almost entirely. It doesn’t need an independent buyer to appear, a public market to reopen, or a price to be tested against competing bidders the way an open sale process would. In effect, the same firm is setting the terms on both sides of the trade.

What this means if you're the one being offered a price

None of this makes continuation vehicles a poor option, for managers or for the investors who take the cash. For many limited partners sitting in portfolios that have simply stopped distributing, an above-NAV exit via a continuation vehicle is a genuinely good outcome, often a better one than waiting years for an eventual trade sale in today’s constrained market. The difficulty is knowing, in the moment a price is put in front of you, whether it actually reflects where comparable assets of that size, sector and structure have been trading, or whether it reflects what one manager, marking its own homework, has decided to offer. With pricing now bifurcating this sharply, at or above par for the assets a manager wants to keep, and at a meaningful discount for nearly everything else, a headline that simply says “the secondaries market had a record year” tells you almost nothing useful about where your own position actually sits within it.

That is increasingly the real skill the record figures are obscuring: not simply reaching the secondaries market, which is now well-trodden ground, but knowing, from current and comparable evidence rather than a market-wide average, what a specific asset in a specific structure should genuinely be worth before a manager, a buyer or a counterparty puts a number in front of you. In a market growing this quickly and pricing this unevenly, that distinction is doing far more work than the headline figures let on.