Secondaries Investor’s Second Thoughts

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Secondaries Investor’s Second Thoughts podcast focuses exclusively on private markets’ burgeoning secondaries market, which is offering liquidity to its underlying illiquid asset classes. Hear analysis from Secondaries Investor’s global team of journalists and interviews with the market’s most influential players and rising stars discussing the dynamics shaping this ever-evolving area.

20 FEB

Secondaries' next iteration: market capitalisation in 2026 and beyond

Secondaries volumes to date in 2026 are ahead of what they were at the same period last year, driven by a lack of distributions, with investors taking advantage of strong prices. LPs have become even more sophisticated in the past few years. A factor that is aiding their sophistication is the rise of asset class-focused products, offering them the ability to bring portfolios to market that are met with the right cost of capital. New entrants are coming to the market in earnest. These players represented 16 percent of the $226 billion of deal volume seen last year, compared with just 7 percent of the $114 billion of volume in 2023, according to Evercore's year-end report. Alongside these developments, secondaries manager M&A continues. This year alone, EQT has agreed to buy Coller Capital for up to $3.7 billion, while KKR agreed to buy sports investing specialist Arctos Partners with plans for a secondaries build out as part of its vision for the future of the combined firms. Evergreen capital has also emerged as a secondaries market mainstay, according to Evercore's report. Permanent capital funds have raised $46 billion for secondaries to-date with near-term fundraising coming in at $25 billion. A quarter of secondaries buyers have an evergreen fund, with this proportion set to rise in future. In this episode, Nigel Dawn, global head of Evercore's private capital advisory group, discusses the capitalisation of the secondaries market over the longer term, and how this will change the way Evercore works with the buyside. He also dives into how secondaries market activity will take shape in 2026 at a time where private markets activity is expected to ramp up.

35 min
6 JAN

What’s driving European secondaries activity?

The European secondaries market saw a string of sizeable deals across the course of 2025, with expected growth continued both this year and beyond. European managers CapVest, Montagu, Norvestor and PAI Partners secured CV-on-CV transactions over the course of last year, with CVC, Inflexion and TDR Capital also securing sizeable CVs, to name just a few. Belgian holding company Groupe Bruxelles Lambert and APG Asset Management also scored large LP-led portfolio deals. In this episode, editor Madeleine Farman is joined by Gabriel Möllerberg, managing director at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Lea Lazaric Calvert, a senior managing director at Evercore, and Nik Morandi, senior managing director at Blackstone Strategic Partners. The group discuss the rise of CV-on-CV transactions in Europe, the nuances around creating alignment given the prevalence of full fund carry waterfalls, the rise of first time sellers in the European secondaries market and expectations for European secondaries activity in 2026.

30 min
01/12/2025

The new era of GP-led secondaries

This episode is sponsored by Lexington Partners, LGT Capital Partners and Davis Polk In 2024, GP-led deals hit a record of $71 billion in transaction volume, accounting for 44 percent of the total secondaries market volume of $160 billion, according to Evercore’s FY 2024 Secondary Market Review. This is significant and marks the increasing popularity of continuation vehicles as an exit route. In this episode, Secondaries Investor senior editor Adam Le is joined by Lexington Partners’ Jeffrey Bloom, LGT Capital Partners’ Brooke Zhou and Davis Polk’s Leor Landa. The trio explore how GP-led transactions have rapidly grown into a mainstream liquidity and portfolio-management tool, against a backdrop of constrained exit markets, rising LP demand for liquidity and increasing GP comfort with continuation vehicles. They also examine market dynamics across deal sizes, noting the challenges of scaling mega single-asset vehicles and the significant untapped opportunity in the mid-market, where many GPs are still early in their GP-led journeys. Brooke Zhou is a partner at LGT Capital Partners in Hong Kong, an investment committee member, and is responsible for origination, due diligence, execution and monitoring of Asian primary and secondary investments Jeffrey Bloom is a partner on the secondaries team at Lexington Partners focused on the origination, evaluation and execution of continuation vehicle transactions Leor Landa is a partner and head of investment management at Davis Polk Adam Le is senior editor, EMEA, Private Equity Group, at PEI Group

52 min
02/10/2025

Unpacking the early rise of GP stake secondaries

GP stake secondaries transactions are steadily gaining traction as investors seek exposure to leading private equity firms. Though still in their early stages, these deals are often described as offering some of the most attractive risk-return profiles in today’s volatile market. In this episode, Jon Costello, founder of Devon Park Advisors, and Christopher Zook, founder and chief investment officer of CAZ Investments, join Americas correspondent Hannah Zhang in a discussion on the forces driving the rise of GP stake secondaries. With approximately $10 billion in assets, CAZ Investments has committed a large portion of its capital – about $5 billion – to GP stakes opportunities, Secondaries Investor reported in June. The firm deployed $700 million in GP stake secondaries alone in 2024, including a single transaction valued at over $500 million. Costello, who is tracking the GP stakes market closely, said GP stakes secondaries have the potential to achieve the same growth curve as has recently been seen in private credit secondaries if the market is able to pair the right structures with the right cost of capital. Zook added: "Wall Street folks are really smart, and they're going to figure out a way to dice and slice cashflows and all kinds of creative ways to be able to satisfy different demands that investors have. GP Stakes will be nothing different. It's already happening a little bit. I think it's just going to accelerate."

26 min
24/09/2025

Inside secondaries' expansion into private wealth

This episode is sponsored by Lexington Partners, Proskauer and StepStone Group The secondaries market is benefitting from private markets' push into the private wealth space, with managers either launching secondaries-focused vehicles or secondaries making up a meaningful component of many evergreen funds. Evergreen funds raised $16 billion in the first half of 2025 alone, 60 percent of which is dedicated to secondaries capital, according to estimates from Campbell Lutyens included in its H1 Secondary Market Overview Report. In this episode, editor Madeleine Farman is joined by Lexington Partners' Taylor Robinson and StepStone Group's Brian Borton, both of whose organisations run evergreen vehicles deploying into the secondaries market. Proskauer’s head of its registered fund group John Mahon also joins the conversation. In the wide-ranging conversation, Mahon, Borton and Robinson discuss appropriate ways to structure these vehicles, where to invest evergreen capital, regulatory updates, the long-term trajectory for these vehicles, and how they may impact the secondaries market.

43 min
09/07/2025

Infra LP-leds rule by volume, but GP-leds are sizeable

This episode first appeared on The Infrastructure Investor Podcast In this special crossover episode from our affiliate title, Infrastructure Investor editor-in-chief Bruno Alves sits down with Madeleine Farman, editor of Secondaries Investor, as well as Infrastructure Investor Americas editor Zak Bentley, to talk about the infrastructure secondaries market. The discussion tracks the evolution of the burgeoning infrastructure secondaries market, the asset class’s best-in-class pricing compared to other private asset classes, how LP-led deals rule by volume but GP-led transactions end up being the most sizeable, the outsized role of continuation funds, the promise of the nascent buyer-led secondaries opportunity, and much more.

32 min
16/06/2025

The opportunity surrounding uncertainty

This episode is sponsored by Pomona Capital and Proskauer While the Trump administration's tariff announcements and the subsequent unfurling of uncertainty globally does create some headaches, it also creates a tailwind for the LP-led secondaries market. "What the market has trouble adjusting to is uncertainty. And what happens in times of uncertainty, like the times we're dealing in now, is that [M&A and IPO] transactions tend to pull away," Michael Granoff, founder and chief executive of Pomona Capital, said in the latest edition of Secondaries Investor's Second Thoughts podcast. "That uncertainty does tend to push more sellers into the secondary market... And so, in a funny way, it's not that we're uncorrelated to the world – we are – but on the other side of things, all of those things that keep us up at night that we're talking about actually create more opportunity for a buyer in the secondaries market." While market participants continued to put their heads down and get deals done that were far along when the tariff announcements occurred, secondaries professionals are still working to digest second- and third-order impacts, Galen Lewis, a partner in Proskauer's private funds group, explained. "Normally, distress of some sort is something that creates additional volume in the secondaries market." In this far-reaching discussion, Granoff and Lewis discuss a variety of issues affecting the LP-led market and the drivers of underlying deal volume, including the regulatory developments that may spur or hinder LP-led portfolio sales in the coming year, the rise of '40 Act capital, as well as new entrants.

44 min
09/05/2025

What’s next for StepStone after its record real estate fundraise?

As volatility pushes real estate investors to look for liquidity, secondaries can provide some attractive solutions. Now, StepStone Group has a record-setting fund in its arsenal to seize the opportunities. StepStone now manages the largest dedicated real estate secondaries vehicle raised to date having closed StepStone Real Estate Partners V on $3.77 billion in commitments last month. An additional $730 million from separately managed accounts brings the total haul to $4.5 billion. In this episode, Jeffrey Giller, head of real estate at StepStone, speaks to reporter Silas Sloan on how the fundraise came together, what the firm is looking for in a deal and where the real estate secondaries market goes from here. “The secondaries market in private equity has been such an important tool for liquidity for so many years,” Giller says. “It hasn't yet happened in real estate, but it inevitably will.”

22 min

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Secondaries Investor's Second Thoughts trailer

Secondaries Investor's Second Thoughts podcast focuses exclusively on private markets' burgeoning secondaries market, which is offering liquidity to its underlying illiquid asset classes. Hear analysis from Secondaries Investor's global team of journalists and interviews with the market's most influential players and rising stars discussing the dynamics shaping this ever-evolving area.

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2 min

Secondaries Investor’s Second Thoughts podcast focuses exclusively on private markets’ burgeoning secondaries market, which is offering liquidity to its underlying illiquid asset classes. Hear analysis from Secondaries Investor’s global team of journalists and interviews with the market’s most influential players and rising stars discussing the dynamics shaping this ever-evolving area.