Davis Polk partner and Investment Management practice head Leor Landa participated in Buyouts’ fifth annual secondaries roundtable discussing challenges and opportunities within the secondaries market.

“Pricing is strong across a broad slice of the secondaries market, with a positive selection bias bringing high-quality assets from ex­cellent managers into the market,” Leor said. “The market is clearly resource constrained, with shortages of both capital and peo­ple. We started the year with north of $200 billion in dry powder and we are now somewhere closer to $150 billion – the deployment numbers are big but you have to wonder what they could be without those constraints. We are living through the worst fundraising environment in private markets that I have seen in a quarter of a century of practice. But we are still getting record fundraising in secondar­ies. People see it as a bright spot in the market.”

Noting that secondaries have proven to be more than a rainy-day strategy, Leor explained, “There is a persistent and false narra­tive that secondaries are having a mo­ment because M&A and IPO activity are down, and this is the only place to get liquidity. Sure, 2024 was our best year ever in secondaries and it was the worst year for M&A and IPOs. But be­fore that our best year for secondaries was in 2021, which was by far the best year for IPOs and M&A. Secondaries is not some derivative market that de­pends on a lack of liquidity elsewhere, it is its own market with secular reasons why it is growing.”

Discussing a shift in the secondaries buyer mindset away from a focus on diversification and towards more buy-side excitement about single assets, he said, “It is easier for sin­gle asset CVs to tell a narrative, because it is portfolio company level. When it is multi-asset, it’s a fund level narrative. But we are seeing all types of deals getting done: single assets, multi-assets, multi-funds, concentrated port­folios and broader portfolios.”

Addressing the spotlight that has been on over-allocation, Leor said, “The over-allocation issue is a micro cycle. But the world of just purely passive large portfolios letting GPs decide when and how they get liquidity is a world of a decade ago. We now live in a world of active port­folio management and that is not going away.”

“Secondaries markets race to keep up with demand,” Buyouts (December 1, 2025)

Copy link to share post