Keen to hear updated perspectives on secondaries, particularly given the rise in GP-leds and how much the market has evolved over the last year. I know there are a few threads on this already, but most seem dated or fairly backward-looking.
Interested to get takes on:
1. Exit opps: How realistic is it to move from secondaries into traditional buyout PE? Are GP-led skills now more transferable than older threads suggest? Does LP-led vs GP-led experience matter?
2. Skillset: Are you actually more of a “pure investor” in secondaries given the focus on risk / reward? Equally, is the work more technical in some ways because of the financial structuring involved in GP-leds and more complex transactions? Or is the underwriting ultimately less deep because you’re often one step removed from the asset?
3. Perception / prestige: How is secondaries actually viewed within private capital relative to buyout, private credit, infra, REPE, growth, etc.? Is it increasingly seen as its own asset class and therefore somewhat outside the traditional PE ecosystem, or is it still viewed as a core part of PE? Does that distinction matter for how the experience is perceived by other PE investors / recruiters? Interested in how people would rank it within private capital.
4. Is traditional PE becoming less attractive?: Between liquidity issues, slower career progression and carry taking longer to realise / not being realised at all, does the traditional PE value proposition still hold to the same extent? Is secondaries becoming a more attractive career path as a result?
5. Platform: How important is the firm / brand name in secondaries? Which platforms are strongest for GP-led exposure, training, comp and exit optionality?
6. Pigeonholing: At what point do you become viewed as a “secondaries person” rather than a broader PE investor?
7. Compensation: What does comp look like in secondaries vs buyout PE at the junior / mid-level, including carry?
8. Top secondaries platform vs weaker MM PE: How would people compare a strong secondaries platform versus a weaker mid-market PE fund with a very niche sector focus / investment thesis? Which gives the better investing experience and longer-term optionality?
9. Outlook: Where do people see secondaries evolving over the next 12–24 months? Does the continued growth in GP-leds make the strategy increasingly closer to traditional PE, or do the career paths remain fairly distinct?
Would be especially keen to hear from people who have worked in secondaries / buyout specifically, or those who have moved between the two.
Based on the most helpful WSO content, here are insights addressing your questions on secondaries vs. buyout PE:
1. Exit Opportunities
2. Skillset
3. Perception / Prestige
4. Is Traditional PE Becoming Less Attractive?
5. Platform Importance
6. Pigeonholing
7. Compensation
8. Top Secondaries Platform vs. Weaker MM PE
9. Outlook
These insights reflect the evolving dynamics of secondaries and their increasing relevance within private capital.
Sources: Q&A: PE Secondaries Principal, Q&A: PE Secondaries Principal, Pitchbook: PE Secondaries to Boom in 2023
Bump! Let me know any perspectives here on any of the topics above
There is a lot here, very little relevant.
In secondaries you’ll make a very good living. It’s perhaps the best work life adjusted compensation on the street. No operating, no origination, increasingly interesting structuring is taking place. Great way to build a network given you’re both an LP and a GP and you can pick and choose when to wear each hat and benefit from both. However, it’s not buyout, some people go to primary buyout but that doesn’t mean it’s the norm. Private markets liquidity / financing is a huge, booming, trend with secondaries being one way to play it.
Thanks for the insights. These are the considerations that have come up in conversations with peers and are shaping my own thinking about the space. Skill development, compensation and longer-term career options are important when deciding which path to pursue. Appreciate your perspective on secondaries and the broader liquidity trend
My point is no one on a desk is actually thinking/speaking this way. Exit opps, prestige, etc.
I would also encourage people to think more holistically about the private market ecosystem. Primary buyout is one of the least interesting area of private markets today. But, that depends what you are solving for with respect to your professional career.
If you want to do traditional buyout do the standard IB > PE recruiting route. Secondaries doesn’t get you any closer in practice.
Many thanks for the insights here, don't want to hi-jack but do you mind me asking that do you think it's do-able to pivot from RE Debt to broader secondaries? The private market really intrigues me but everyone said that RE is true piegon hole, so I'm thinking moving to RE secondaries firtst then go broader. Don't know if you think this is possible? Really Appreciate!
The answer to most questions like this sure, anything is possible, it’s just not likely. Joining an ABS desk originating/structuring/syndicating RMBS/CMBS could be interesting and you can make a decent living.
Otherwise, reach out to smaller shops and just beg for a job. Junior hiring on the sellside for secondaries is pretty solid right now so you’ll probably have a better chance landing a job like that secondaries is interesting because the sellside advisors generally make more in most instances than on the buyside. Once you’re doing the job, even at a chop shop, you can trade up. I would just have a plan B because there is a high likelihood this doesn’t work. There are like ( RE secondary worths of note so I would focus just on that.
Stop being risk-averse nerds trying to min-max your life and do what you actually find interesting. One of the great beauties of life is that nothing has to be or typically is fully linear, because the world isn't linear. What matters is that you find what you're into. This whole obsession with optionality is weird too, because all it really signals is that you have no conviction in anything. Obviously you don't have full information coming in, nobody does. But making money and being successful requires actually betting on something. You cannot hedge your entire life, at some point you have to stick to something.
The jobs of buyouts and secondaries are so different at the senior level that the people who are good at them have completely different temperaments. Enjoyment isn't a luxury here. It's the thing that lets you sustain the effort that compounds into being good, and being good is what actually pays. Pick the one that suits you, not the one you think has the highest theoretical ceiling. There's no guarantee you'll ever reach that ceiling anyway. Past performance is not indicative of future returns for anything including industries that are cyclical in nature. Everyone else is overthinking it because they hate their jobs and need to believe it gets better at the next promotion. It doesn't. You either like the work or you don't. Figure out which, and go do that.
How would you characterise the different personalities / temperaments that genuinely do well at the senior level in buyouts vs secondaries?
What is secondaries comp at junior to mid career level?
I think anything related to Fund Finance / Secondaries is a bad field to be in if you want to move into an investment role / buy side.
Your specialty in these seats is analyzing a fund rather than a company which is a completely different skill with different considerations/risks/underwriting criteria/stakeholder dynamics/etc.
stay only if you want long-term to become a specialist in funds vehicles/legal aspects related to these (interesting and quite unique) but understand that it won't have the same optionality as other roles (even less the more you stay)
If by buyside you mean specifically primary buyout investing (+adjacencies) I would agree. But to say an investment seat at a secondaries fund or alternative lender doesn’t actually teach you to invest is a wild assertion.
Fund finance has been on a wild ride the last decade. Sure no one cares about sub lines, but putting money to work at 8-10% by advancing 20% against a portfolio of 6-12 companies? Sure beats the value prop in DL. Being paid 12-14% to be >2x over collateralized by a diversified portfolio of top tier sponsor collateral is a no brainer relative to most else that is out there today.
sure, investment lato sensu, but how much investment accumen do you really need for this?
would you really call yourself a sophisticated investor on par with some Credit/PE/HF guy (or even build any transferable skills for buyside, except for CVS)?
It might be drastically oversimplified on my end, but it's (probably) not too far from reality to say that secondaries/fund finance is one of the most intellectually lazy fields out there (reminds me of the "slap a discount on the NAV and call it a day" lol).
Not sure I fully agree with this take. Secondaries is inherently an investment role on the buyside. Anything that involves committing capital and underwriting risk means you’re investing. What differs is the nature of that underwriting - whether across public markets, private markets (buyout, credit, growth, venture, etc.) which is what gives rise to different asset classes and career paths. Also, with the way secondaries is evolving, particularly with SACV and MACV, there is increasingly a company-level underwriting component as well
A literal child could do secondaries investing.
Mind elaborating what these secondaries bankers actually do? Has always confused me
What’s the basis for this perspective? Are you actually a secondaries investor, and have you worked on GP-leds? I’d have thought the structuring element in more complex secondaries transactions can make the work quite technical, so interested in what specifically you find so menial or easy about it
There is structuring, but the guys that are really doing it in an interesting way are the pref providers not the equity providers. It is not complicated on the common equity side, or won’t feel complicated after you do 1-2 trades. You negotiate terms sure, carry ratchets, purchase price deferrals, funding profiles (sponsor equity first before 3rd party), fee rebates if performance slips, performance guarantees, but that stuff isn’t complicated it’s what happens in markets with a capital supply demand imbalance. That said, an MD will do $1.5-$2.5M cash with $10-$30M carry per fund, more for the “fund head” or manco owner. Frankly, you want to find a space that is underserved by capital and interesting not interesting due to complexity alone because capital doesn’t follow true complexity - that’s just sponsor marketing BS. I can find you plenty of more intellectually challenging jobs that pay $250k if you were prefer that…
The joke, once you spend a decade or two actually working on wallstreet, is that nothing that is done at scale is complicated. Securitizations? Literally just saying Note buyers get the first cash flows and equity buyers get what’s leftever. Claude can legitimately build you a fully functional CDO model now over the course of a 2-3 hours and people still talk about the RMBS like it was some financial wizardy that a layman with a basic understanding of arithmetic can’t understand.
By definition any market that trades billions annually is simple enough for most people to understand. The real complicated shit is the stuff that only exists in a small corner of the market because if it was easy enough to explain to a bunch of people someone would be getting paid 2/20 to invest in it but that requires convincing a bunch of government employees they can understand it.
Will provide an earnest reply to an honest question, despite my initial comment being mostly crass.
I have worked on LP, GP, all flavors of CVs, royalty streaming, purchases of BDCs, structured equity deals, and everything in between.
There is nothing about this industry that is complex, it might be novel at first, but you are just buying something from another person and potentially giving them upside / having them protect your downside. You can create fancy waterfalls but at the end of the day that doesn't cover 99% of the work or value, its slogging through portfolios of trash and trying to value investments with often intentionally poor information provided to you. You will never have the opportunity to gain real depth on any company or industry doing work in this business, it is surface level information and analysis and you build ZERO acumen as an investor.
Also to the folks throwing around pay packages for these "bankers" as evidence of something, congrats? I can promise you that AI will not be kind to someone who's entire job is turning NDAs, throwing docs in a data room, scheduling calls, and sorting bids from high to low. I look forward to this market becoming more efficient.
Someone is upset that a lot of Nigels VPs make low 7 figures and his SMDs closer to $10M… the credit secondaries bankers that got traded around the last year? All the guarantees I saw were multi-year in the $5-$7M range (yes, a lot is stock)… What you’ll come to learn is that most people in finance are of average intellect and competence, with maybe a self selection for those who are willing to sacrifice other areas of their life in exchange for a business card they think they are supposed to have. And average intellect is bad, I am talking shocking how those people remember to still breath when they are eating stupid, and plenty of them are in super lucrative careers. Most firms across the street in any capacity have a handful of people, sometimes just 1 who are legitimately impressive, the rest just go and do what that guy tells them.
I am super judgemental of people and think most of them are trash but on the flip side I have to give credit where credit is due. When I see lazy, stupid, people making $1-$5M in a super easy job - hats off to them. Doing challenging but interesting work for half the pay of guys doing easy work is not a trade I would make as I get older.
What I have never understood is why people get upset when people kill it financially without needing to be an autistic genius. There was a porta potty rental business for sale in the north east in early 2026 where the seller was taking home $1.5-$2M a year as an owner operator. He was shoveling shit for a living and doing better than 99% of on the street with an infinitely better QoL
I work in secondaries on the buyside. are VPs really pulling that much at evercore? I'm going to cry now lol.
i went to harrvard
a literal child could do research for a HF
Think the answer really depends on what type of secondaries you’re doing.
For LP-leds, the underwriting is generally more fund / portfolio-level, which is probably what most people historically associated with secondaries.
GP-leds, particularly single-asset continuation funds, are very different. You’re underwriting the actual company, business model, industry, management team, operating case, downside, exit and remaining value creation plan, and you can have direct interaction with management, including traveling to meet management teams depending on the process. So in that context I wouldn’t say you’re necessarily “one step removed from the asset” in the way people often assume.
That distinction is probably even more relevant at larger legacy PE platforms that have built out secondaries businesses and perform diligence more like direct investing (BX, Apollo).
Also, as someone mentioned earlier, I think the network aspect is pretty underrated. In secondaries you’re constantly interacting with both LPs and GPs across the market, so over time you can build a pretty broad network across sponsors, funds and institutional investors. That can be especially valuable longer term because you end up knowing people across a much wider part of the PE ecosystem than you might in a more narrowly focused seat. I know someone at a MF / UMM that helped build out a secondaries platform and has made some pretty insane connections through the job just from interacting with so many different GPs and LPs, people she probably never would’ve met otherwise.
Obviously it’s still not the same as being the control sponsor, since you don’t own the portfolio company relationship or drive the operating agenda in the same way, but I think the historical perception of secondaries as mostly buying diversified LP interests at a discount is increasingly outdated. The landscape has changed pretty materially with the growth of GP-leds.
Thank you - appreciate your perspective
Would add leads are almost always getting board observer seats on CVs… some are starting to take active board seats and bringing in industry advisors. It’s a rapidly changing market… have said this elsewhere but just in the past 2 years the level of diligence has changed significantly on GP-leds… many instances where the GP-led guys are sharper than my own clients lol
Thank you - thats a helpful observation on the GP-leds
Thanks for sharing your perspectives so far - is there any view on how comp evolves between secondaries & buyout?
Buyout you’ll get paid more, secondaries you’ll actually realize your carry.
Top secondary shops (all in cash): associate 250-300, VP 475-550, Principal 650-850, MD Junior 1.25-1.5M, MD Senior 2-2.5M.
Carry VP 1-2M, principal 4-7/8, MD 10M+ per vintage. Fund heads up to $100M in carry. Jeremy coller = billionaire. One shop gives the secondary team a sweep of the annual evergreen fund just like the drawdown fund carry and guys are getting paid 5-10M per year but that contract is getting renegotiated by the parent and isn’t the norm.ed
At some of the larger legacy PE platforms with built-out secondaries teams (like BX/Apollo), the delta in cash comp can be much narrower (and in some cases roughly the same depending on platform and fund size) compared to buyout, given how much the asset class has grown and evolved. Where the difference can become much more meaningful is carry, especially given the potentially higher likelihood of actually realizing it in secondaries, as the other poster mentioned.
Very insightful bro. Appreciate you sharing
Does anyone have a view on how the top secondaries platforms stack up? Is there a good framework for segmenting the market / thinking about the different tiers - similar to how people think about BBs in IB or MF / UMM / MM in PE?
I don’t think there’s a clean BB / MF style ranking because secondaries seats can look really different depending on the strategy and how the platform was built.
I’d look at GP-led deal exposure and how the business was built in the first place (i.e. was it acquired, did leadership evolve after acquisition, was it built organically, etc.), since that can influence diligence style. BX/Strategic Partners, Carlyle/AlpInvest, Ares/Landmark, CVC/Glendower, TPG GP Solutions + TPG/NewQuest, KKR/Arctos, New Mountain/Atlas and Apollo/S3 all came together pretty differently.
If I wanted to start in or move into secondaries but also preserve optionality toward traditional company investing down the road, I’d probably lean toward one of the larger integrated PE platforms, but I’d still diligence the actual team. Not to say the traditional secondaries firms like HarbourVest or Lexington aren’t worth a look, I’m sure there are still great standalone players. It just feels like secondaries is following the same broader trend you’ve seen in credit, RE and infra, where the big integrated alternatives platforms have increasingly built out major businesses in the asset class. I’d also diligence culture and hours pretty heavily at the integrated platforms, since some of those teams can definitely run pretty long hours.
Here’s how I’d bucket it based on interacting with all of these buyers.
GP-led focused: LGP or TPG - they have the most momentum of the direct entrants. They have a good mix of CV experience but lean heavily on their direct sector colleagues for underwriting edge. Lindsay Goldberg, NMC, Warburg, etc. I’m sure will all also be good but too early to tell and the other guys have more momentum. For tech / growth focused AKKR and Hg are both interesting. Would toss in NorthSands of the independent guys with real upside potential and really sharp people. Realistically in the long run I see the GP-led capital consolidating with these type of players.
“Generalist” / Traditional Secondaries: these are the folks that still do both LP-leds and GP-leds and have that more traditional secondaries model - diversified funds in a sense. I honestly think Apollo S3 is the golden seat for these players. Good team/culture, strong pay, strong fundraising, building portfolio scale (GP relationships), flexible mandate all while still having access to the broader Apollo platform for underwriting edge. Other strong names NB (sharp, strong returns), GS, Lex, HarbourVest (although haven’t heard the best things culturally here). Downside with these platforms is they are established so upward mobility is difficult (except S3, likely still room there but selective).
May I ask your insights on the RE secondaries market? Very interested in secondaries but I'm in a RE seat, wondering if it's possible to pivot to that by RE secondaries? Many thx!
Interesting comparison. I think the choice between secondaries and a buyout really depends on the situation, the goals of the investors, and the stage of the company. A secondary can provide liquidity without changing ownership of the business in the same way as a full buyout. On the other hand, a buyout can make more sense when there is a clear opportunity to take control and pursue a longer-term strategy. I also think valuation and the terms of the deal can make a big difference, so it is useful to look beyond the headline transaction value.
A lot of interesting points brought up by folks. To answer your OP (my 2 cents):
Would love to hear others' thoughts.
Where do players like StepStone/GCM Grosvenor/HarbourVest compare to MF secondaries platforms in work but also comp?
Consequatur ipsa quo fuga voluptate numquam magnam dignissimos aliquid. Ipsa facilis id iusto inventore. Quod dicta maxime quam beatae illum aut eius. Corporis nobis enim maiores dolores itaque. Et placeat in et. Explicabo ea est qui.
Quos deserunt iste et atque similique. Voluptatum iusto consectetur non. Maiores quibusdam quis et cumque molestiae exercitationem culpa perferendis. Sit nulla atque voluptatem quam eos veritatis facere. Corporis iusto officiis laborum alias natus consectetur.
Explicabo placeat accusantium dolor fugit et et officiis. Animi animi corporis rem atque possimus iusto sed tenetur. Quisquam officiis eos corrupti accusantium praesentium. Voluptas ut debitis porro. Accusamus libero voluptas qui deserunt. Ut voluptas reiciendis vero in reiciendis consequatur.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...
Voluptatem debitis distinctio et sit. Quibusdam soluta voluptatem qui consectetur.
Voluptas et ut nihil sed quisquam. Sint ipsum error dolorem ad unde. Provident nesciunt maxime quo voluptas et. Dolorum ratione et consequuntur enim vitae.
Autem maiores est delectus magni aliquam. Nemo praesentium harum nemo autem. Corrupti alias quos voluptate.