Methodology

Every factual value displayed is attached to at least one source. The attachment 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, and the record says so.

Each source is described by its publisher, its type, an assessment of its quality, and how it can be accessed. Selecting a value in the table opens the source behind that value rather than a single citation for the whole row.

A value we cannot attach to a source is not published. Where a figure circulates widely but cannot be traced back to a document, it is not recorded as a fact.

Secondaries Desk records GP-led secondary transactions: liquidity transactions initiated by the fund manager rather than by an investor selling its fund interest. Continuation vehicles come first — the manager moves one or more assets out of an existing fund into a new vehicle funded by secondary buyers, and the fund's existing investors elect either to sell their exposure or to roll it into the new vehicle.

Sponsor-to-sponsor buyouts are not secondaries and are not recorded as such. A sale between two managers is an exit for one and an entry for the other; it does not create the investor election that defines a GP-led transaction.

Coverage is built one transaction at a time. It is not a census of the market and does not claim to be.

A transaction is one economic event. It is described across a fixed contract of twenty-six fields, in a fixed order. The twenty-six-field structure is fixed, versioned and reviewed before any change is introduced.

The fields describe what was transacted, who transacted, what the legacy position looked like before the transaction, what the continuation vehicle looks like after it, and who advised.

A continuation vehicle can hold a single asset or several. When it holds several, the transaction keeps one parent row and each asset is described in its own row beneath it, across a fourteen-field asset contract.

Asset-level values are never derived from the parent, and parent-level values are never obtained by summing the assets. Where a source supports a figure at one level only, the other level stays N/A.

Two different things are tracked separately, and they are never interchangeable. The lifecycle status describes the transaction itself. The review status describes our work on the record.

A verified announced transaction is not presented as closed. A record that has not been reviewed is not published, whatever the transaction's lifecycle status.

Records are amended. When a source is superseded or a value turns out to be wrong, the record is corrected and the correction is written as an append-only event: the previous state is not overwritten silently.

If you find an error in a record, tell us.