The private markets news of the moment is dominated by private equity secondaries. Early this month Coller Capital, the long-time dedicated specialist private market secondaries manager, announced the launch of its Secondaries Institute, a new digital educational platform developed to support its private wealth secondaries solutions business.
Neuberger Berman announced the closure of its NB Strategic Capital Fund II at over US$4 billion against a $2.5 billion initial target, establishing what the company says is one of the largest general partner-led secondaries funds raised to date.
Meanwhile, Blackstone is buying around $5 billion in positions from New York Pensions, comprising 450 commitments from 125 funds and 75 managers, according to Bloomberg. The news agency also reported that Yale University endowment is about to sell some $2.5 billion of private equity stakes at an average discount of less than 10%.
Goldman Sachs Group is reportedly in the process of forming its own ambitious secondaries effort.
Secondaries are suddenly where all the cool kids want to be. A celebrity-like profile published by Business Insider is titled “the 14 dealmakers investors call when they want to offload their private equity fund stakes”.
According to Coller Capital, secondaries accounted for around $160 billion in transaction volume last year, up 40% from 2023. And that’s even before the liquidity crunch that hit the asset class really hard in the second quarter of 2025. Coller Capital pegs addressable market for secondaries at around $10 trillion, and growing fast.
Whence all this enthusiasm? Isn’t a secondary sale essentially an admission of failure, solid proof that an investment proposition has failed to deliver its promised return on time?
A couple of caveats: incumbent investors’ retreat from private equity doesn’t mean a retreat from private markets per se. Witness their appetite for private credit, for instance. Also, private markets investors may have perfectly legitimate reasons for adjusting their allocations that have nothing to do with asset class underperformance.
Nonetheless, the scale of the retreat into the secondary market does not send good signals about the health of the primary one. Barron’s magazine, in reporting on US Congressional and regulatory plans to open up private markets to small investors, asks the reasonable question: why would you want to invite retirement savers in when the professional investors are struggling to get out?
