How is market sentiment shaping secondaries fundraising and deal activity?

In this episode of PEI Group’s Data Dive podcast, PEI’s senior content producer, Evie Rusman, is joined by Secondaries Investor editor Madeleine Farman and PEI head of special projects for private equity Louise Fordham to discuss the findings from the Secondaries Investor Global Market Survey 2026. The survey, conducted in partnership with Goodwin, polled LPs, GPs, secondaries buyers and the intermediary community about market trends, transaction processes, deployment issues, regulation and more.

PEI’s new Data Dive miniseries digs into our proprietary data, surveys and rankings, as well as recent market data sets, to understand what investors and fund managers are thinking, where capital is moving and how private markets are evolving.

Read the full coverage of the Secondaries Investor Global Market Survey 2026 here. Download a data pack of the findings discussed in the podcast episode here.

This episode is sponsored by Dawson Partners, StepStone Group and Davis Polk

Ongoing uncertainty within private markets over the past year has helped fuel interest in credit secondaries.

Institutions have turned to private credit looking for relatively stable returns. Furthermore, managers and LPs are turning to the secondaries market for liquidity as they look to manage their own portfolios.

“Those have dovetailed together to create this tailwind behind private credit secondaries,” Davis Polk partner Sijia Cai said on the latest edition of Secondaries Investor’s Second Thoughts podcast. “It has the best of both worlds in that it's offering liquidity solution to people in a way that also mimics and has the stability and the yield and the returns of private credit.”

In this episode, Secondaries Investor’s editor Madeleine Farman is joined by Dawson Partners’ Yann Robard, StepStone Group’s John Bohill and Davis Polk’s Sijia Cai. They explore how the private credit secondaries market has evolved, the fundamental differences as compared to private equity secondaries and what is driving the surge in GP-led credit secondary transactions.

They also discuss pricing, investor appetite and what will define success for managers operating in this rapidly growing segment of the market.

Secondaries volumes to date in 2026 are ahead of what they were at the same period last year, driven by a lack of distributions, with investors taking advantage of strong prices.

LPs have become even more sophisticated in the past few years. A factor that is aiding their sophistication is the rise of asset class-focused products, offering them the ability to bring portfolios to market that are met with the right cost of capital.

New entrants are coming to the market in earnest. These players represented 16 percent of the $226 billion of deal volume seen last year, compared with just 7 percent of the $114 billion of volume in 2023, according to Evercore's year-end report.

Alongside these developments, secondaries manager M&A continues. This year alone, EQT has agreed to buy Coller Capital for up to $3.7 billion, while KKR agreed to buy sports investing specialist Arctos Partners with plans for a secondaries build out as part of its vision for the future of the combined firms.

Evergreen capital has also emerged as a secondaries market mainstay, according to Evercore's report. Permanent capital funds have raised $46 billion for secondaries to-date with near-term fundraising coming in at $25 billion. A quarter of secondaries buyers have an evergreen fund, with this proportion set to rise in future.

In this episode, Nigel Dawn, global head of Evercore's private capital advisory group, discusses the capitalisation of the secondaries market over the longer term, and how this will change the way Evercore works with the buyside. He also dives into how secondaries market activity will take shape in 2026 at a time where private markets activity is expected to ramp up.