Why the exploding secondaries market is hard to pin down

Secondaries are an elephant-sized black box. 

The market is mammoth, expanding, and—here’s the kicker—we have no clue how big it really is. The secondaries market has exploded in recent years, driven by a simple problem: companies are staying private longer, exits have dried up, and investors need inventive ways to return cash to their LPs.

New PitchBook data estimates that, in 2025, somewhere between $62.5 billion and $120.9 billion were traded in U.S. direct secondaries. Now, $58 billion-plus is a helluva range, but more importantly: that’s a margin of error larger than many markets. (The worldwide total addressable market for, say, soap is around $50 billion.) One point of comparison: $50 billion was the volume for all of 2024. 

PitchBook has good reason for keeping its estimates broad. The secondaries market, as big as it’s gotten, is structurally opaque. There are a few rules that force disclosure and investors—frequently small firms and wealthy individuals—often buy shares with incomplete information. The FOMO logic isn’t all that different from public markets. If you like OpenAI, you want a piece of it—it’s the same as someone buying Disney stock because they believe in the name. 

The difference, of course, is that nothing is publicly reported. Some deals get done through large institutions (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Charles Schwab all did 2025 acquisitions to bolster their secondary operations). Those Wall Street-funneled deals are for the big fish—if you........

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