In private equity secondaries, the advisors who run the process see every bid while the market sees none. How intermediaries set prices, where PitchBook and Preqin fall short, and what a public benchmark would do to spreads.
It is 8 a.m. on the morning bids are due, and the advisor's conference room already smells like a trading desk. A $900 million portfolio of LP interests — thirty-odd fund positions assembled over a decade by a European pension — has been shopped to the market for five weeks. By noon the team will know what the portfolio is worth. Nobody else will. Not the bidders. Not the data vendors. Not even, in any detailed sense, the seller.
This is the peculiar power structure of private equity secondaries. In a $226-billion-a-year market, the people who set the price are rarely the buyer or the seller. They are the intermediaries standing between them — and they set it by deciding who bids, what bidders see, and how the auction is run.
Three names dominate the advisory business: Evercore's Private Capital Advisory group, Lazard's Private Capital Advisory team, and Jefferies. Their semi-annual market reviews are the closest thing this market has to an official record. Their real product is not the reports. It is the process.
When a pension or sovereign fund decides to sell, the advisor designs the transaction like an M&A auction — with one crucial difference. In M&A, the target's financials are the shared reality. In secondaries, the shared reality is the data room, and the advisor controls it: who is invited, how the portfolio is packaged, the NAV reference date, and how hard to push price discovery. Those choices move the clearing price.
The concentration is extreme. One analysis of LP-led transactions found 96% of purchasers were dedicated secondaries funds, with buy-side mandates accounting for 77% of deals — a small club of repeat players bidding against each other in processes run by an even smaller club of advisors. Nearly 20% of transactions now exceed $500 million: a handful of mega-processes each year set the pricing weather for everything beneath them.
The advisors also grade their own homework. The pricing surveys everyone cites are built from the advisors' own deal flow — proprietary, unaudited, and skewed toward the deals they won. In a market with no tape, the people with enough observations to publish statistics are the ones with a commercial interest in how they read.
PitchBook and Preqin have built formidable private-markets databases, and both now track secondaries pricing. But their surveys arrive lagged and aggregated — never transaction-level. A vendor can tell you average LP-led pricing was 90% of NAV in H1 2025, per Jefferies. It cannot tell you what a $400 million portfolio cleared for last month.
The gaps matter most where the market is growing fastest. Private credit secondaries nearly doubled to $20 billion in 2025, per Evercore's 2025 Credit Secondary Market Survey — yet pricing data stays thin enough that the bid-ask spread on performing credit portfolios, which tightened from 18–22% discounts in early 2024 to 10–14% by late 2025 per Lazard's secondary pricing data, is still quoted anecdotally rather than indexed. GP-led continuation vehicles, now the majority of volume at $65 billion in H1 2026 per Evercore, price through bespoke negotiations with stapled financing and deferred consideration that resist standardization.
Then there is the demand side nobody talks about. '40 Act interval funds now allocating to secondaries must strike a daily NAV — a daily price for assets that trade by appointment. That regulatory need is creating the first genuine commercial buyer for independent pricing data. The race to build a credible secondaries index is already on.
Ask the sellers and you hear a different frustration. For an LP — a pension CIO, an endowment treasurer, a family office principal — the secondary process is the rare moment their private portfolio gets a market verdict, and they feel the information asymmetry directly. They hire the advisor to close the gap, but the advisor wants the deal to clear — fees are paid on completion — while the seller wants the highest price, which sometimes means letting a process fail and re-running it. Reputation manages the tension, mostly.
Sophisticated sellers have adapted. The largest pensions run dual-track processes, seed multiple advisors, and build their own pricing history from every process they touch. The 40% of 2024 LP sellers who were first-time participants, per Evercore's data via Commonfund, are the most exposed: no internal pricing database, no feel for the bid-ask, fully dependent on the advisor's read of the room. In this market, the learning curve is a tax on newcomers.
So what happens when the tape finally arrives — a public, transaction-level benchmark for secondaries pricing? Spreads compress. Sellers anchor on the last print, and the dispersion between the best-advised sellers and the naive ones narrows. Advisors lose part of their information rent — the quiet premium earned for knowing what things actually clear for — and compete more openly on execution and relationships.
The buyers' edge compresses too. Today, a secondaries fund's proprietary pricing database, built from hundreds of bids won and lost, is a genuine moat. Lexington Partners' Jeffrey Bloom and his counterparts at Coller Capital, Ardian, and Blackstone Strategic Partners underwrite portfolios against a private history of comparable prints nobody else can see. A public benchmark commoditizes part of that history. The best underwriters would still win — Hamilton Lane's finding that two-thirds of secondary returns come from post-purchase appreciation suggests the real skill was never just buying cheap.
Here is the counterargument, and it is stronger than transparency advocates admit. Full price transparency could shrink the market it aims to improve. Secondary sellers prize discretion — a pension does not want its GPs, its board, or its peers knowing it sold at 82 cents, and a GP running a continuation vehicle does not want the roll-versus-sell election politicized by a public print. Push every price into the open and some volume goes back into the dark: bilateral deals structured to avoid the benchmark's gaze. Anyone who watched TRACE transform corporate bond trading should recognize the pattern.
The benchmark is coming regardless, because the buyers of the data now include regulated funds that cannot operate without it. The only question is who builds it. The smart money is on the advisors: Evercore's PCA team already publishes the most-cited numbers in the market, and converting that franchise into the industry's reference price is the natural monopoly to own.
For everyone else, the implication is to act as if the tape already exists. Sellers should build their own pricing databases now — sellers with history will be the price makers when benchmarks arrive, and sellers without it will be price takers. Buyers should assume their proprietary pricing edge has a half-life and invest in underwriting skill that survives transparency. And anyone allocating to secondaries funds should ask a sharper question than "what discount do you buy at." Ask what they know that the tape will never show.
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