Thriving On Volatility
At PEI’s annual secondaries roundtable, Ian Wiese shared perspectives on the global secondaries market, which reached $240 billion in transaction volume in 2025, up 48% year over year.
According to data from Jefferies, the global secondaries market reached $240 billion in transaction volume in 2025, a record-breaking high and a 48 percent increase on 2024’s previous record.
“Last year was extremely active, driven by the protracted slowdown in M&A and IPOs, as well as increased adoption rates. LPs and GPs alike are simply getting more comfortable with doing secondaries deals,” says Rocío Heres, a partner at AltamarCAM, speaking on Private Equity International’s annual secondaries roundtable.
“Furthermore, all the signs are that this growth is set to continue. More than half of sellers in 2025 were new to the secondaries market. Those parties are likely to become repeat sellers.”
Wilfred Small, co-head of US secondaries and primaries at Ardian, agrees: “A series of macro shocks that started with the pandemic, and continued with the rise in interest rates, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Palestine conflict, tariffs, and now the software sell-off and war in Iran mean traditional liquidity routes have remained challenged. Distributions have been running at around 10 percent of NAV for a prolonged period of time now, compared with historical norms of between 20 and 25 percent. That has become a structural driver of dealflow.”
Ian Wiese, managing director at Barings Portfolio Finance, adds that secondaries volumes are also being propelled by an expansion in the asset classes that are trading: “Historically, it was private equity that dominated the secondaries market, but now we are seeing rapid acceleration in the credit secondaries, infrastructure secondaries and real estate secondaries markets.”
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