Two hundred and forty billion dollars in secondaries — and the Debevoise roundtable wants to pitch the volatility as good news. This is Infrastructure Secondaries Daily. Today: a record number wrapped in 'thriving on volatility' language — and one question the panel doesn't really answer: who's buying the other ninety percent? Private Equity International, with Amy Carroll and Madeleine Farman:
Ian Wiese, managing director at Barings Portfolio Finance, adds that secondaries volumes are also being propelled by an expansion in the asset classes that are trading: “Historically, it was private equity that dominated the secondaries market, but now we are seeing rapid acceleration in the credit secondaries, infrastructure secondaries and real estate secondaries markets.”
Jefferies puts full-year 2025 volume at $240 billion — up 48 percent from 2024. And before anyone files that next to the $103 billion H1 figure we broke down on Sunday: one is a mid-year snapshot, the other is the full year. Different denominators, different conversations. Right, the number got bigger overnight. What I want to know is whether the rules around this market grew 48 percent too. The ILPA GP-led framework is a 2019 vintage staring at 2025 scale — and that gap just got wider. And the roundtable's whole frame is 'thriving on volatility.' Volatility as a demand driver means macro shocks are pushing sellers toward liquidity. That says appetite is high. It doesn't tell you whether the underlying infra is marked right. Exactly. Ardian says distributions are running at 10 percent of NAV, versus a 20-to-25 norm. So who's stuck? Public pensions with liquidity mandates. When a market 'thrives' on volatility, it's also thriving on their inability to wait. And here's the math problem. The Allianz infra-secondaries figure we aired Tuesday — $25 billion — is roughly 10 percent of this $240 billion. So if the thesis is 'infra is eating secondaries,' it still has to explain who's buying the other 90. At 48 percent annual growth, the buyer-side diligence machine couldn't have scaled at the same pace. So each dollar deployed is getting less intrinsic-value work behind it. More than half of 2025 sellers were first-timers — fresh sellers meeting a buyer pool that's already stretched. Okay, so if today's headline is a fresh H1 volume number, I want to know who's actually on the other side of these trades — and why a sophisticated institution would buy somebody else's half-used fund interest instead of just writing a check into a new fund. Yeah. Start with scale. Allianz Global Investors says 2025 was a record year for infrastructure secondaries, with deal volume around $25 billion, so we're past the niche-backwater phase. On the buyer side, it's dedicated secondaries funds, plus the traditional pensions and sovereign wealth funds. And the dedicated-fund bucket is getting much bigger: Ares Management closed Infrastructure Secondaries Solutions III at $5.3 billion. That's purpose-built capital competing at institutional scale. On the 'why buy secondhand' point, HarbourVest's answer is pretty simple: you can skip the early return drag — the J-curve — put money to work faster, and buy into assets that are already seasoned and producing cash, rather than still in construction or ramp-up. Then Alter Domus gives you why supply keeps coming. Closed-end fund timelines don't line up neatly with the natural life of infrastructure assets. GPs want a way to hold strong assets longer; LPs may need liquidity before the fund matures. That mismatch keeps feeding deal flow for buyers. So if the J-curve skip is the main draw, are buyers paying a premium for that seasoning, or are they still getting in at a discount? CAIS says average LP-led secondary pricing rose in the first half of 2025, and they tied that to better market confidence and stronger demand from secondary buyers. So the discount cushion that used to make secondaries feel like a bargain is getting squeezed. If pricing keeps moving toward NAV, the J-curve skip has to justify more of the deal, and buyers need real operational discipline. Alter Domus specifically calls execution capability the deciding differentiator in a market scaling this quickly. If Infrastructure Secondaries Daily is part of your routine, consider subscribing and leaving a quick review wherever you're listening. It helps other people find the show, and it helps us keep making it useful.
You'll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes. If something deserves a closer read, it's all there. That's Infrastructure Secondaries Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.