The Secondaries Market in Charts: $226 Billion and Counting

The private equity secondaries market moved $226 billion in 2025, according to Evercore Private Capital Advisory's annual survey. Jefferies puts the number at $240 billion. Lazard says $233 billion. Pick whichever number you like, the story underneath is the same: this was the first year secondaries volume broke $200 billion, and it happened by a wide margin. Five years ago, in 2020, the entire market moved $60 billion. You are looking at a market that has nearly quadrupled in half a decade, and if you are an accredited investor who has never looked at secondaries as an asset class, this is the year that changes.

I write the Angel Investors Network data column because raw numbers without context get people hurt. So let's build the chart set first, then talk about what it means for your money.

The volume trend: from niche to necessity

Secondaries used to be the place distressed sellers went when they needed to exit a private equity fund stake before the fund matured, usually at a painful discount. That story is dead. The table below tracks annual global secondary transaction volume going back to 2013, using Evercore's dataset, which is the most commonly cited benchmark on Wall Street trading desks.

Year	Total Secondary Volume	Year-over-Year Change
2013	$26 billion	n/a
2020	$60 billion	n/a
2022	$103 billion	n/a
2024	$171 billion	+66% vs. 2022
2025	$226 billion	+32% vs. 2024
H1 2026	$121 billion	+19% vs. H1 2025

Look at that last row. H1 2026 alone did $121 billion, according to the Evercore H1 2026 Secondary Market Review. That is more than the entire full-year total for 2022, done in six months. Jefferies now projects the market crosses $300 billion in annual volume within 12 to 24 months, and Evercore's own house forecast for full-year 2026 sits at $250 billion to $260 billion. If either firm is even close to right, secondaries will have gone from a $26 billion sideshow in 2013 to a market bigger than the entire venture capital fundraising industry, in roughly a decade.

Why does this matter to you specifically? Because secondaries are how institutional and, increasingly, accredited money gets liquidity in an asset class (private equity and venture capital) that was built to lock your capital up for 7 to 12 years. When a market this size exists to buy and sell stakes in that locked-up capital, it changes the risk profile of every private fund commitment you make. Illiquidity is no longer absolute. It has a price, and now you can look that price up.

Who's selling, who's buying: LP-led vs. GP-led

There are two structurally different trades happening under the "secondaries" umbrella, and conflating them is the single most common mistake I see retail-adjacent investors make when they read a headline like "$226 billion secondaries market."

An LP-led deal is when a limited partner, meaning a pension fund, an endowment, or a family office, sells its existing stake in a fund to a buyer, typically at a discount to net asset value (NAV), the fund manager's stated value of the underlying holdings. A GP-led deal is when the general partner running the fund itself engineers the transaction, most often through a continuation vehicle. The GP rolls one or more prized portfolio companies into a new fund vehicle, existing LPs get the choice to cash out or roll forward, and new secondary buyers come in to fund the cash-out option. GP-leds are effectively the fund manager deciding it isn't done with a winning asset yet and building a mechanism to hold it longer while giving old investors an exit.

Period	LP-Led Volume	LP-Led Share	GP-Led Volume	GP-Led Share
Full-year 2025 (Evercore)	$120 billion	53%	$106 billion	47%
Full-year 2025 (Jefferies)	$125 billion	52%	$115 billion	48%
H1 2026 (Evercore)	$56 billion	46%	$65 billion	54%

That flip in H1 2026 is the headline most trade press missed. For the first time on record, GP-led deals, the ones the fund manager initiates rather than the investor, took majority share of the market. That tells you something concrete: general partners have gotten comfortable using continuation vehicles as a standard portfolio tool, not an emergency valve. Blackstone, Coller Capital, and Strategic Partners have all built dedicated GP-led desks specifically to underwrite these deals at scale, per the Jefferies 2025 Global Secondary Market Review.

Now let's look at pricing, because this is where the real dispersion in this market lives, and where most surface-level coverage of the "secondaries boom" falls apart.

Pricing-to-NAV: one market, four very different stories

The average LP portfolio in 2025 traded at 87% to 88% of NAV, down roughly 200 basis points from 89% in 2024, according to Jefferies data compiled with Eaton Partners (now part of Stifel). A 200-basis-point pricing decline in a year when volume rose 32% sounds contradictory until you break the average apart by asset class. The blended average is hiding a market that is bifurcating hard.

Asset Class	2025 Pricing (% of NAV)	What It Means
Buyout	92% – 94%	Near-full value, buyers trust the marks
Private credit	91% – 94%	Near-full value, cash-yielding assets command a premium
Venture capital	77% – 78%	Steep discount, buyers doubt the marks and the exit timeline
Real estate	~70%	Deepest discount, distressed valuations and a rate-driven repricing still unresolved
Blended average (all strategies)	87% – 88%	Masks the spread above

Read that table again. Buyout and credit stakes trade within single-digit percentage points of what the fund manager says they're worth. Venture stakes trade at a 22-to-23-point discount. Real estate trades at a 30-point discount. That is not one market moving. That is four markets moving at four different speeds, and the $226 billion headline number flattens all of it into a single misleading data point.

The dry powder problem, and why August 2026 makes sense now

Here's the number that explains everything happening this month. Dedicated secondary dry powder, meaning capital already raised and committed to secondaries strategies but not yet deployed, hit a record $327 billion in 2025 by Jefferies' count, or roughly $215 billion by Evercore's narrower definition. Add in the traditional LP capital and leverage secondary buyers also draw on, and total secondary buying power runs close to $477 billion. The capital overhang, meaning how many years of current deal volume that dry powder could fund, fell to a historic low of 1.3 years, compared with 2.7 years for the broader private equity buyout industry.

That is a market with too much cash chasing too little supply, at least in the asset classes buyers actually want. It's exactly the setup that produces the August 2026 fundraising wave you may have seen in the trade press. Adams Street Partners closed its Global Secondary Fund 8 at $2.7 billion plus another $2.3 billion in separately managed accounts, for a total secondaries program north of $5 billion, roughly 50% larger than its 2023 predecessor fund. GCM Grosvenor closed its inaugural Credit Secondaries Fund at $1.2 billion. MetLife raised $1.2 billion for a private equity secondaries strategy. None of these firms are raising blind. They are raising into a documented supply-demand imbalance where dry powder needs a home, and credit secondaries specifically, the fastest-growing sub-segment, nearly doubling from $11 billion in 2024 to roughly $20 billion in 2025, is where the fresh capital is concentrating. Ares Management raised $7.1 billion for its first dedicated credit secondaries strategy earlier this year, and Pantheon is reportedly targeting more than $6 billion for the same trade.

Jeff's take: where the growth actually lives

Here is what I think most coverage of this market gets backwards. The story isn't "secondaries are booming." The story is that secondaries are bifurcating into a high-conviction segment and a discount-bin segment, and the growth is disproportionately concentrated in the high-conviction segment.

Buyout and credit secondaries trading at 91% to 94% of NAV means buyers largely believe the marks. That's a market functioning the way a mature asset class should: price discovery is tight, spreads are narrow, and institutional capital treats it as a portfolio management tool rather than a fire sale. The GP-led continuation vehicle trend reinforces this. When a general partner rolls a top-performing buyout company into a continuation fund instead of selling it outright, that's a vote of confidence dressed up as a liquidity mechanism, and secondary buyers are pricing it accordingly.

Venture and real estate are a different animal entirely. A 22-to-30 point discount to NAV tells you buyers don't trust the sticker price. Venture funds mark portfolio companies using the last funding round, which in a slow IPO and M&A environment can sit stale for two or three years. Real estate marks got hammered by the 2022–2024 rate cycle and many funds still haven't fully repriced. Buyers in these segments aren't rewarding growth. They're demanding a margin of safety because they've been burned by optimistic marks before.

So when you see "$226 billion secondaries market, up 32%," what actually happened is: credit and buyout secondary demand grew fast enough to pull the whole market average up, while venture and real estate stayed priced like distressed assets. If you're an investor evaluating a secondaries fund, the manager's strategy mix matters enormously. A fund overweight credit and buyout secondaries is playing a fundamentally different, lower-risk game than a fund buying discounted venture stakes and betting on a valuation recovery.

What the aggregate numbers hide

I have to be straight with you about the limits of this data, because $226 billion sounds like a clean, audited figure and it isn't. Evercore, Jefferies, and Lazard each publish their own estimate, and they disagree by roughly $14 billion, or about 6% of the total. That's not because anyone is lying. Secondaries deals are privately negotiated, rarely disclosed with full terms, and each bank's number reflects the deals it advised or tracked, extrapolated to estimate the full market. Treat any single-source figure as directionally right, not precise to the dollar.

The bigger risk hiding inside the aggregate numbers is dispersion in asset quality, not just price. A pricing average of 87% to 88% of NAV tells you nothing about which specific fund stakes traded near par and which traded at 50 cents on the dollar because the underlying companies were actually impaired. Averages compress a wide distribution into one number. When GP-led continuation vehicles roll over "trophy assets," meaning the best-performing companies in a fund, the vehicles trading near NAV are self-selected for quality. LPs choosing to sell out of an LP-led deal are sometimes doing so because they need liquidity for reasons that have nothing to do with the asset (a pension rebalancing, an endowment spending mandate), but sometimes they're selling because they know something about the fund's prospects that the buyer doesn't. Adverse selection is a real risk in any secondary market, and the aggregate volume and pricing statistics can't tell you, deal by deal, which side of that line a given transaction sits on.

There's also a leverage question buried in that $477 billion total buying power figure. A meaningful share of secondary fund capital is deployed using subscription lines and NAV-based leverage facilities. In a market where pricing already sits at a discount for venture and real estate, leverage amplifies losses just as fast as it amplifies gains if those discounts widen further before they narrow.

What this means for your portfolio

If you are an accredited investor with existing exposure to private equity or venture funds through platforms like CAIS or through direct fund commitments, the practical takeaway is this: you now have a functioning market to check the implied value of your illiquid holdings against, and increasingly, a path to sell before your fund's stated 10-year term is up. That's a real and useful development. It does not mean you should treat a secondary sale, or a secondary fund investment, as free money.

If you're considering committing capital to a secondaries fund directly, ask the manager for the exact split between LP-led and GP-led deals in their book, and ask for the pricing-to-NAV breakdown by strategy, not just the blended number. A secondaries fund quoting you an 88% average purchase price could be buying diversified buyout stakes near full value, or it could be loading up on discounted venture and real estate positions hoping for a repricing that may take years. Those are different bets with different risk profiles, and the marketing deck will not volunteer the distinction unless you ask.

Finally, remember that record dry powder cuts both ways. A $327 billion pile of committed secondary capital chasing a shrinking overhang of 1.3 years means competition for the good deals, buyout and credit stakes near NAV, is fierce, which can compress future returns in exactly the segment that looks safest today. The discount segments, venture and real estate, are less crowded precisely because the risk is real, not because the market has overlooked a bargain. Price the risk you're actually taking, not the headline growth rate.

Author Disclosure: Jeff Barnes, MBA has no personal position in any company, fund, or platform named in this article. Angel Investors Network has no current commercial relationship with any party mentioned. AIN provides marketing and education services, not investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal.