Questions

What is Secondaries Desk?

Secondaries Desk is a structured database of GP-led secondary transactions. Each transaction is described field by field, and each factual value is attached to the source that supports it. It is designed for people who need to understand what happened in a transaction and where that information comes from.

What is a GP-led secondary transaction?

The initiative comes from the manager of the fund, not from an investor wanting out. The manager proposes to move one or more assets into a new vehicle backed by secondary buyers, and the investors already in the fund are given a choice: take liquidity now, or continue their exposure in the new vehicle. That choice is what separates a GP-led transaction from an ordinary sale.

What is a continuation vehicle?

A newly formed investment vehicle that acquires one or more assets from an existing fund. It can hold a single asset or several, and it is funded by secondary buyers, often with a lead investor and a syndicate alongside.

Which transactions are included?

Transactions that meet the GP-led test: the manager initiates the transaction, and the fund's existing investors are given a choice between selling and rolling. Continuation vehicles come first. Sponsor-to-sponsor buyouts are excluded — a sale between two managers is an exit for one and an entry for the other, and it creates no investor election.

Does Secondaries Desk cover LP-led transactions?

Not at present. Current coverage is GP-led transactions. LP-led sales, where an investor sells its interest in a fund to another investor, are a distinct category and are not recorded today.

Where does the transaction data come from?

Sources can include public reporting, sponsor and advisor communications, and regulatory material. Each factual value is attached to the source that supports it. The full sourcing method is set out in the Methodology.

How is each value linked to its source?

The link is at the level of the value, not of the transaction. A date, an amount and a multiple in the same row can come from three different documents. Selecting a value in the table opens the source behind that value, rather than a single citation for the whole row.

What do ⓔ, ~ and N/A mean?

ⓔ marks an estimate and ~ marks an approximation. Both carry their mark everywhere they appear, so a reader never has to guess whether a figure was reported or inferred by someone else.

N/A records the absence of a supported value: either nothing was disclosed, or nothing in the sources supports one. It is not a figure and it does not stand for zero. Precision is preserved rather than normalized — a date sourced to a month is shown as a month, not as the first day of that month.

How are multi-asset transactions presented?

A transaction keeps one parent row. When the continuation vehicle holds several assets, each asset is described in its own row beneath it, with its own dates, multiples and enterprise value. Asset-level values are not derived from the parent, and parent-level values are not obtained by summing the assets.

What is the difference between a transaction's status and its review status?

The transaction status describes the transaction itself — whether it has been announced, reported as completed, cancelled, and so on. The review status describes our work on the record. The two are never merged: a transaction that has been announced and verified is not presented as completed.

Is the database intended to be exhaustive?

No. Coverage is built one transaction at a time, and the record contains only transactions that have been researched, sourced and reviewed. It is not a census of the market and does not claim to be. A transaction absent from the database is not evidence that it did not happen.

How are records corrected or updated?

Records are amended when a source is superseded or a value is found to be wrong. Corrections are recorded as append-only events rather than silently overwriting the previous state. The full correction process is described in the Methodology.

How do I get access to Transactions and Metrics?

Transactions and Metrics can be viewed and scrolled without an account. An account is required to interact with a value, open transaction details or sources, or use the table controls. Accounts require email confirmation. You can create an account or sign in.