The $100 Billion Market With No Price Tape

Somewhere in a midtown conference room this spring, the investment committee of a large public pension plan voted to sell roughly $400 million of private equity fund interests. No press release followed. No ticker flashed. Over the next six weeks, a handful of advisors circulated a data room to a short list of specialist buyers, collected sealed bids, and told the pension what its fifteen-year-old portfolio was worth. The answer arrived as a single number — a percentage of net asset value — negotiated in private, witnessed by almost no one, and final.

That is how the largest liquidity market in private capital still works. Every year now, more than $200 billion of limited-partner fund interests and GP-led continuation vehicles change hands. And there is no price tape. No exchange. No screen where a seller can look up what a 2019-vintage buyout fund cleared for last Tuesday.

From backwater to behemoth

The numbers tell a story of scale that has outrun the market's plumbing. Evercore's Private Capital Advisory team — the industry's most-watched scorekeeper — pegged full-year 2025 secondary volume at more than $226 billion, a gain of over 40% on 2024. The first half of 2026 then came in at $121 billion, up nearly 20% year over year and the strongest half-year on record. Jefferies' own H1 2025 Global Secondary Market Review counted $103 billion, essentially matching Evercore's $102 billion for the same period. Two independent tallies, same message: this market doubles in size every few years and keeps accelerating.

The composition has shifted just as fast. In 2024, GP-led transactions — continuation funds, tender offers, strip sales engineered by the fund manager rather than the limited partner — hit a record $71 billion, about 44% of the $160 billion total, according to Evercore's FY 2024 Secondary Market Review. By the first half of 2026, GP-led activity had pulled ahead decisively: $65 billion, up 35% year over year, against $56 billion of LP-led volume, up just 4%. The sellers' market is no longer only pensions and endowments rebalancing. It is increasingly the GPs themselves, manufacturing liquidity for their own funds.

The LP-led side has its own records. Evercore counted $87 billion of LP-led volume in 2024 alone — a figure that, as Commonfund noted, would have ranked as the sixth-largest year ever for the entire secondary market. Twenty-seven LP transactions exceeded $1 billion in 2024, up from 19 the year before. And roughly 40% of those sellers were first-time participants, a sign that secondaries have crossed from emergency tool to standard portfolio management. Buyouts dominated the flow at 72% of H1 2025 volume, with growth, venture, credit, and infrastructure splitting the rest.

How the price gets made in the dark

Every secondary deal is priced against a number that is itself an estimate. NAV — net asset value — is the GP's quarterly mark on a portfolio of private companies, usually set weeks before a deal closes and often lagging public-market comparables by a quarter or two. The buyer does its own underwriting, builds its own view of what those companies are worth, and then bids a percentage of the reference-date NAV. The gap between the two numbers — the discount, or occasionally the premium — is where the entire negotiation lives.

In 2024, average LP-led pricing ticked up 400 basis points, from 85% to 89% of NAV, according to Evercore's data as reported by Commonfund. By the first half of 2025, Jefferies put average pricing for all LP portfolios at 90% of NAV — and noted that after a brief wobble in early April around tariff announcements, pricing "quickly and sharply rebounded." The trend is unmistakable: discounts are compressing as dedicated buyer capital — Evercore estimated roughly $194 billion of dry powder in mid-2026, with other estimates running as high as $216 billion — chases a growing but still finite supply of quality portfolios.

But averages hide the real story. High-quality buyout interests in recent vintages clear in the low 90s. Venture and tail-end portfolios can clear 25 to 45 cents on the dollar. The same reference NAV can produce two wildly different prices depending on who is bidding, how many bidders the advisor invited, and how badly the seller needs out. There is no consolidated quote. The advisor running the process sees every bid; the seller sees a summary; the market sees nothing at all.

The counterargument: the dark is the point

Skeptics of reform have a case worth hearing. This opacity is not an accident of history — it is load-bearing. Secondary buyers like Lexington Partners, Coller Capital, Ardian, and Blackstone Strategic Partners earn their returns precisely by knowing more than the seller about what a portfolio is worth and pricing that knowledge edge into every bid. Hamilton Lane's secondary market work has found that roughly two-thirds of secondary returns historically come from post-purchase appreciation, not from the discount captured at entry. The discount is the visible part of the trade; the underwriting is the business.

Put a public tape on this market and the first-order effect is spread compression. Sellers would anchor on the last print. Bidders would shade their offers toward the consensus. The information rents that fund entire secondaries franchises would shrink. Some practitioners argue — with feeling — that full transparency would actually reduce liquidity, because sellers who need discretion, from sovereign funds to family offices managing succession, would simply stay home rather than transact on a lit stage.

What happens next

The tape is coming anyway. It is just arriving in pieces. Evercore, Lazard, and Jefferies now publish semi-annual pricing surveys that function as a rough public benchmark, and their data quality improves every year. Private credit secondaries — nearly $20 billion in 2025, per Evercore's 2025 Credit Secondary Market Survey, almost double the $10.9 billion of 2024 — are developing their own pricing conventions, with GP-led credit deals averaging 98% of NAV. Data vendors like PitchBook and Preqin are racing to build transaction-level datasets. The '40 Act interval funds now buying secondaries need daily pricing for their own NAV calculations, which creates a commercial buyer for benchmark data that did not exist five years ago.

The investment implication is blunt. In a market with no price tape, the price setters are the intermediaries who see the flow — the advisors running processes and the dozen or so mega-buyers who bid on everything. Their edge compounds with every deal they touch. But every survey published, every data point that leaks into the open, transfers a little of that edge from the insiders to the market. The houses that own the data — Evercore's PCA team first among them — are in the best position to mint the benchmark everyone will eventually trade against. In the $226 billion market with no price tape, the most valuable asset is not the capital. It is the record of what things sold for.