About

Secondaries Desk is a database devoted to one part of the private markets: GP-led secondary transactions, and the continuation vehicles that carry them.

It is narrow on purpose. Rather than summarizing a market, it keeps a file on each transaction it covers.

Information about a GP-led transaction arrives in pieces. The terms surface in one place and the participants in another; the multiples appear in a third; the sector classification is implicit; the advisors are mentioned once; and the evidence for any of it sits in documents that are rarely read together.

Secondaries Desk exists to hold those pieces in one file. Terms, participants, metrics, classification, advisors and the evidence behind each of them live in a single record, in the same shape for every transaction, so that two transactions can be read against each other without being reassembled first.

Continuation vehicles, single-asset and multi-asset alike, one transaction at a time.

A multi-asset vehicle is not flattened into a single line. The transaction is kept whole, and each asset it holds is described separately underneath it.

Research is done fact by fact. A transaction is not summarized from one article and then annotated: each field is established on its own, and the source that establishes it is attached to it.

Every transaction is then described across the same twenty-six fields, in the same order, so that nothing depends on how a particular story happened to be written. The Methodology sets out the field contract, the sourcing rules, and the review that precedes publication.

The database is not exhaustive and is not trying to be. It grows as transactions are researched and reviewed, which means its silence carries no information: a transaction that is not here may simply not have been worked on yet.

Coverage today is GP-led. Sponsor-to-sponsor buyouts are not treated as secondary transactions — they are ordinary changes of owner, and counting them would describe a different market from the one this database is about.

Values are marked for what they are. An estimate carries ⓔ and an approximation carries ~, wherever either appears. N/A is not a quiet zero: it says that nothing in the sources supports a value there.

The state of a transaction is kept apart from the state of our work on it, so a deal that has been announced is never shown as completed. The FAQ answers the questions this raises most often.

The published table can be viewed and scrolled by anyone, without an account. An account is needed to interact with a value, open a transaction's details or its sources, use the table's controls, or reach Metrics. Confirmation is by email.

For questions, corrections or account support, write to contact@secondariesdesk.com.