The Secret Life of Secondaries

How a behind-the-scenes force of finance quietly rewrote the rules of private markets

In the summer of 1990, Jeremy Coller was walking against the current. While most of London’s finance world was chasing primary deals, Coller was calling old LPs – the kind who were locked into private equity funds they couldn’t get out of – and asking them a strange question:

Would you like to sell your stake?

They thought he was joking.

Back then, selling a stake in a private fund wasn’t just unimaginable, it was taboo. A sign of weakness. A confession of misjudgment. You were meant to wait it out, for better or worse.

But Coller wasn’t joking. He launched Coller Capital, the first European firm built entirely around buying these unwanted assets, and raised $87 million between 1991 and 1996 for its first fund.[¹] While the beginning was humble, the successor fund closed on $240 million in 1998, validating and rewarding his vision.

In that moment, the secondaries market, an almost accidental invention, became an industry.

And like most things in finance, it started in the shadows.

For years, secondaries were the market’s unspoken utility closet: useful, discreet, vaguely unclean.

If you needed to get out of a fund early – a portfolio rebalance, a liquidity crunch, a change in mandate, you’d call one of the few specialized firms.

Deals were small, bilateral, secretive. Prices were negotiated in whispers. Sellers rarely admitted they were selling.

Then came the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

In the wreckage, secondaries went mainstream.

Suddenly, even the most prestigious institutions – CalPERS, Harvard Management Company, Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation – were looking to clean up their books.

CalPERS famously dumped a $2 billion private equity portfolio in 2007-2008, selling stakes at high discounts.[²]

The stigma broke.

Liquidity, it turned out, was no longer shameful. It was survival.

Firms like Lexington Partners, HarbourVest, and AlpInvest stepped in.

They didn’t just buy, they professionalized.

They brought in real pricing models, institutional due diligence, and competitive syndication processes.

Secondaries, once the dumping ground of distressed LPs, became the proving ground for rational allocators.

But perhaps the most radical shift came not from LPs wanting out, but from GPs wanting to stay in.

Consider a recent case. In 2025, New Mountain Capital faced a dilemma.

Their portfolio company, Real Chemistry, was growing fast. But the clock on their fund was winding down.

Instead of selling, they created a $3.1 billion single-asset continuation vehicle, allowing early LPs to exit, while bringing in fresh capital to hold the asset longer, under the same GP.[³]

This structure, now common, flipped secondaries on their head.

What began as a liquidity solution became a portfolio optimization tool.

Why sell a great company just because the calendar says so?

Today, firms like Vista Equity Partners and TA Associates have turned GP-led secondaries into an art form, engineering liquidity on their terms, and often doubling down on winners.

In fact, 2024 saw $75 billion in GP-led secondaries alone, nearly half the global secondaries market volume.[⁴]

And the scale of secondaries has exploded too.

In 2024, global secondaries volume hit an all-time high of $162 billion, surpassing the previous record of $132 billion in 2021.[⁴]

Ardian, one of the largest secondaries managers, recently closed a $30 billion fund – the largest ever raised for this strategy.[⁵]

Firms like Blackstone Strategic Partners, Lexington Partners, and Goldman Sachs have made $10B+ secondaries fundraises almost routine.

Secondaries are no longer reactionary. They’re proactive.

If you zoom out far enough, secondaries tell an interesting story about capital.

They reveal that markets don’t just mature by scaling up, they mature by learning how to change hands gracefully.

Secondaries, at their core, are about time.

About letting capital move when conviction doesn’t.

India’s private markets are now tiptoeing into that territory.

Scaled startups. Aging VC funds. LPs looking for distributions.

The patterns are familiar because they’ve played out before.

Not all innovations are loud.

Some start in whispers.

Secondaries, once a niche tactic, now make headlines. But their true impact goes far deeper than the news cycle.

They turned liquidity from an afterthought into a strategy.

Sources:

• Coller Capital history: https://www.collercapital.com/about-us/history/
• CalPERS portfolio sale (Private Equity International): https://www.privateequityinternational.com/calpers-puts-800m-of-lp-stakes-for-sale/
• New Mountain continuation deal (Simpson Thacher): https://www.stblaw.com/about-us/news/view/2025/04/22/new-mountain-closes-%243.1-billion-single-asset-continuation-vehicle-for-real-chemistry
• Jefferies Global Secondaries Report (2025): https://www.jefferies.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2025/02/Jefferies-Global-Secondary-Market-Review-January-2025.pdf
• Ardian Secondary Fund IX announcement: https://www.ardian.com/news-insights/press-releases/ardian-raises-record-30-billion-worlds-largest-ever-secondaries

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