Private equity was built on patience. Capital gets locked into a fund for ten years or more, and the investor’s only real exit has traditionally been waiting for the general partner to sell. For institutional LPs that could plan a decade ahead, that structure was a feature, not a flaw. For the growing number of family offices and private investors now allocating a third or more of their portfolios to private markets, a decade of illiquidity is a much bigger commitment, and a market built specifically to shorten it has quietly become one of the fastest growing corners of private markets.
The scale of the workaround
Secondaries volume reached 121 billion dollars in the first half of 2026, up 19% year over year, according to data from Evercore and Campbell Lutyens. Full year volume is now projected to land between 250 and 260 billion dollars, up from 226 billion dollars in 2025, which was itself a record. Five years ago, secondaries were a niche corner of private markets reserved for distressed sellers and specialist funds. They are now on pace to trade at a scale that rivals entire categories of primary fundraising, and the growth shows no sign of slowing.
Who is actually doing the selling
The mix behind that volume has shifted as much as the size of it. GP led transactions, where a fund manager rolls one or more portfolio companies into a new continuation vehicle rather than selling them outright, accounted for 65 billion dollars in the first half of the year, or 54% of total volume, growing 35% year over year. Single asset continuation vehicles now make up 62% of that GP led activity, and the average discount to net asset value on those deals has narrowed to just 2.9%. A transaction type that used to signal a fund manager running out of options now regularly prices close to full value, which is a meaningful change in how the market views these deals.
Why the discount is disappearing
Pricing across the broader secondaries market tells the same story. Quality buyout fund interests are trading at discounts of 5 to 10% to net asset value today, compared with 15 to 25% as recently as 2022 and 2023. Part of the explanation is capital. Dedicated secondary funds raised 95 billion dollars in 2025 and are sitting on close to 194 billion dollars in dry powder, giving buyers far more capacity to compete for quality assets than they had even two years ago. A market with that much committed capital chasing a limited supply of attractive LP stakes and continuation vehicles is a market where sellers increasingly set the terms, not the other way around.
What this means for the investors who need it most
The timing matters most for the investors least equipped to wait out a decade long lockup on their own terms. More than three quarters of family offices surveyed this year plan to increase or maintain their private market allocations, and about a third already commit more than 40% of their portfolios to private equity and venture capital. Roughly half still access that exposure primarily through traditional drawdown funds, the same structures that gave secondaries a reason to exist in the first place. For that group, a maturing secondaries market is not a professional trading desk’s side business. It is the mechanism that determines whether a ten year commitment actually behaves like one, or whether there is a real, fairly priced way out well before year ten if circumstances change.
That is the shift worth watching heading into 2027. Secondaries built their reputation as the place distressed sellers went to raise cash at a discount. The data now describes something closer to a standard portfolio management tool, used by well capitalized LPs to rebalance, manage pacing, and generate liquidity on their own schedule rather than the fund’s. Investors who still think of secondaries purely as a way to buy private equity exposure cheap are underestimating what the shrinking discount is telling them. The bigger opportunity is treating the secondaries market the way its fastest growing buyers already do, as the tool that makes the rest of a private markets portfolio easier to hold.
