Secondaries Investor
Overview
Secondaries Investor is a London-published title of PEI Group providing news, analysis and data on the global private equity secondaries market. It is the specialist publication for the market in which investors buy and sell existing interests in private equity funds and assets: limited partner-led portfolio sales, general partner-led restructurings and continuation vehicles, preferred equity and direct secondaries. As the secondaries market has grown from a niche liquidity mechanism into one of private markets' largest segments, Secondaries Investor has been its dedicated publication of record.
The title serves the buyers, sellers, managers and advisers who make that market: dedicated secondaries firms, institutional investors managing their private equity allocations, general partners restructuring their funds, and the intermediaries, lawyers and placement specialists who execute transactions.
PEI Group Background
Secondaries Investor is published by PEI Group, the London-based private markets information group founded in 2001 following a management buyout from Euromoney Institutional Investor. PEI built a portfolio of globally recognised publications, databases and events focused on alternative asset finance and investment, including Private Equity International, PERE for real estate, Infrastructure Investor and Private Debt Investor. As the group expanded into emerging alternative investment fields, it added publishing brands for those specialisms, and Secondaries Investor was among them, created to serve the secondaries market as that market institutionalised.
The group's ownership has reflected private markets' own growth: LDC backed a management buyout of PEI in 2015, and Bridgepoint Development Capital acquired the group from LDC in 2018. PEI now operates as a subscription information and events business whose publications and databases sit at the centre of the private equity, real estate, infrastructure, private debt and secondaries markets.
Editorial Focus: The Secondaries Market
The title's coverage is organised around the secondaries market's main transaction types. LP-led coverage follows institutional investors selling portfolios of fund interests to manage liquidity, rebalance allocations or exit managers. GP-led coverage follows the rapid growth of continuation vehicles, in which a manager moves one or more prized assets into a new fund, offering existing investors the choice to sell or roll over, a segment that has come to account for a large share of market volume.
Reporting takes in fundraising by secondaries funds, the pricing of portfolios, the use of leverage and deferred consideration, stapled commitments, preferred equity structures, direct purchases of company stakes, and the regulatory and alignment questions that transactions raise. Market participants' concerns, such as fees and expenses in GP-led deals whose documentation was not originally drafted with such transactions in mind, or the concentration limits buyers place on fashionable sectors, are recurring themes in its analysis.
Data and Market Intelligence
Secondaries Investor is more than a news site. It maintains a secondaries market database of intelligence on funds being raised worldwide, with information on target sizes and strategies, and PEI Group's research operation produces dedicated reports on the market, including its studies of the GP-led segment, examining where that market is heading and the challenges it must address as volumes grow.
The title also surveys the market directly. Its inaugural Global Market Survey polled buyers, limited partners, general partners and the advisory community on the issues shaping secondaries, from regulatory scrutiny and the use of artificial intelligence to alignment in continuation funds, and reported on deployment plans, obstacles to completing deals, process pain points and the outlook for GP-led and LP-led activity. Survey work of this kind both measures market sentiment and sets the agenda for the title's subsequent coverage.
Awards
The title's recognition of market achievement has a long lineage. PEI has celebrated the best in class in secondaries since 2004 through the PEI Awards of its affiliate title Private Equity International, with categories for firms, deals, advisers and law firms. For the 2024 awards, those secondaries categories were brought together under the Secondaries Investor Awards banner for the first time, with winners and runners-up decided by a judging panel of senior Secondaries Investor and Private Equity International editorial members rather than by popular vote.
The award categories reflect the market's structure, with deal of the year split between LP-led and GP-led transactions. Law firms and advisers publicise their wins prominently: a leading firm's announcement of its Secondaries Law Firm of the Year honour in the Americas noted that it had advised on more than 430 secondaries transactions in a single year worth over $100 billion, an indication of the scale the market, and the awards, have reached.
Audience and Professional Role
Secondaries Investor's readers are the market's practitioners. Dedicated secondaries buyers use it to follow fundraising and deal flow among competitors; limited partners use it to understand pricing, process and the behaviour of the managers whose funds they hold; general partners use it to gauge appetite for continuation vehicles and other GP-led solutions; and advisers and lawyers use it to track the transactions and firms setting market practice.
Because secondaries transactions are private and terms are rarely disclosed, specialist journalism plays an outsized role in market transparency. Reporting that a major continuation vehicle has closed, that buyers are trimming exposure to a sector, or that a manager has secured commitments for a new programme provides price and sentiment signals that participants cannot obtain from public filings.
Events and Community
As part of PEI Group, the title is connected to the group's extensive events business, which hosts dozens of conferences globally each year across private markets, including gatherings at which secondaries practitioners are prominent speakers and panellists. Its editorial team also contributes to PEI's cross-title initiatives, such as the Women of Influence in Private Markets programme, in which senior secondaries figures are regularly featured, and its journalists appear across the group's podcasts and summits discussing the GP-led market and its direction.
The title's own franchise activities, its awards and its Global Market Survey, function as community institutions for a market whose participants are dispersed across North America, Europe and Asia but who rely on shared reference points for who is active, what is trading and on what terms.
Geographic Scope
Secondaries Investor is published from London by a group headquartered there, but its market is global. The largest secondaries buyers and many leading advisory firms operate across New York, London and other centres; transactions involve funds and assets in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and the title's coverage follows deal activity, fundraising and people moves across all of those regions. Its reporting includes, for example, the growth of Asian secondaries activity and the strategies of global buyers building programmes across GP-led and LP-led segments.
Digital Presence
The title publishes at secondariesinvestor.com, with news, analysis, data pages and survey and awards content organised for subscribers. PEI Group's model is subscription-based: in-depth intelligence, databases and reports sit behind membership arrangements, while headlines and selected coverage circulate publicly and are cited by law firms, managers and other media following the market.
That mixed model is characteristic of modern business intelligence publishing, in which the publication serves simultaneously as a news source, a data provider and a convenor, and in which the same editorial team produces daily journalism, proprietary datasets and annual benchmarking exercises.
Significance
Secondaries Investor's significance tracks the rise of its market. What was once a small, opportunistic trade in unwanted fund interests has become a central liquidity mechanism for private markets, with annual volumes measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars and continuation vehicles reshaping how long managers hold assets. A dedicated title documenting that transformation, its deals, its data, its controversies over alignment and fees, and its leading practitioners, is an essential part of the market's infrastructure.
Within PEI Group's portfolio, the title demonstrates the group's strategy of building a publication for each private markets specialism as it matures, then supporting it with data, research and awards. For readers of this directory, Secondaries Investor is the principal English-language trade publication devoted to the private equity secondaries market.
