Secondaries move to the center

The secondary market used to be where positions went when something had gone wrong. That association is gone. Jefferies counts $240 billion of secondary volume in 2025, the largest year on record, split between $125 billion of LP portfolio sales and $115 billion of GP-led deals, the latter up 53 percent. With holding periods at exit near seven years and distributions to investors at record lows for four years running, secondaries have become the ordinary way private-market positions change hands between endpoints.

Pricing tells the same story. Jefferies has LP portfolios clearing at an average of 87 percent of net asset value in 2025, with buyout funds at 92 percent and venture at 78 percent. Sellers no longer take a distressed discount, and that is what makes the market usable as routine liquidity rather than a last resort.

Each participant has found a use for it. Limited partners manage allocations and liquidity without waiting for distributions. Sponsors keep their best assets longer through continuation vehicles: Coller Capital puts GP-led volume at a record $108 billion in 2025, up from $77 billion a year earlier and $8 billion a decade ago, with single-asset vehicles now the most common format. Founders and early employees take measured liquidity in company-sanctioned rounds; Carta's first-quarter 2026 read is blunt that the secondary market and the tender offer are the real liquidity mechanisms for most private companies today.

For private companies, the practical consequence is that liquidity is now a design question. Cap tables, information rights, and transfer provisions written for a world with one exit event age badly. A company that expects to run long as a private business should decide early who may sell, when, to whom, and on what information, before the first inbound makes the question urgent.

Discipline matters because secondary activity is signaling. An orderly, company-sanctioned window with clean information reads as strength. Scattered one-off transfers at unexplained prices read as something else. Price discovery in secondaries is real, and it anchors future conversations, including primary ones.

For sponsors and boards, the same logic applies at the asset level. Continuation vehicles and structured partial sales are tools, not verdicts. They work when the governance is clean, the valuation process is defensible, and existing investors get a genuine choice. In 2025 they were used to keep top assets rather than to escape a weak market, and that is the version buyers respect.

None of this replaces the exit. It changes the geometry around it. Liquidity has become a capability companies carry rather than an event they wait for, and the ones that treat it that way keep more control over both.