In this episode, senior reporter Carmela Mendoza sits down with Sabina Comis, global managing partner, and Kenneth Young, a partner and co-chair of the corporate and securities practice at Dechert, to unpack key findings from the law firm's 2026 Global Private Equity Outlook.

The survey results, gathered from 100 senior-level executives at global PE firms with at least $2.5 billion in AUM, highlight creative deal structures and the importance of distributions for LPs. The results provide insight into where the asset class may be heading in the next 12 months.

The discussion centres on the gradual thawing of traditional exit channels. The pair outline the most promising opportunities for capital deployment in 2026.

The episode also explores why more GPs plan to make management stake divestitures in the next 24 months and the regional differences behind them; how capital pools are developing to keep companies private for longer; and why future product design of semi-liquid funds could address concerns around valuations.

This episode is sponsored by Lexington Partners, LGT Capital Partners and Davis Polk and first appeared on Secondaries Investor's Second Thoughts podcast.

In 2024, GP-led deals hit a record of $71 billion in transaction volume, accounting for 44 percent of the total secondaries market volume of $160 billion, according to Evercore’s FY 2024 Secondary Market Review. This is significant and marks the increasing popularity of continuation vehicles as an exit route.

In this episode, Secondaries Investor senior editor Adam Le is joined by Lexington Partners’ Jeffrey Bloom, LGT Capital Partners’ Brooke Zhou and Davis Polk’s Leor Landa.

The trio explore how GP-led transactions have rapidly grown into a mainstream liquidity and portfolio-management tool, against a backdrop of constrained exit markets, rising LP demand for liquidity and increasing GP comfort with continuation vehicles.

They also examine market dynamics across deal sizes, noting the challenges of scaling mega single-asset vehicles and the significant untapped opportunity in the mid-market, where many GPs are still early in their GP-led journeys.

Brooke Zhou is a partner at LGT Capital Partners in Hong Kong, an investment committee member, and is responsible for origination, due diligence, execution and monitoring of Asian primary and secondary investments

Jeffrey Bloom is a partner on the secondaries team at Lexington Partners focused on the origination, evaluation and execution of continuation vehicle transactions

Leor Landa is a partner and head of investment management at Davis Polk

Adam Le is senior editor, EMEA, Private Equity Group, at PEI Group

This episode is sponsored by Manulife Investment Management and first appeared on The PERE Podcast

As new industries evolve and accelerate, new opportunities are constantly arising for institutional investors in the private real assets space.

It isn’t always easy, however, for managers to grasp hold of these opportunities. As assets like data centers have become investable in recent years, managers have found that they need to devote time and effort to understand the dynamics around these unfamiliar assets. And the private markets industry has occasionally been guilty of obsessing over which labels to apply to emerging assets.

This is the first episode of our Private Markets 2030 podcast miniseries, part of PEI Group’s wider initiative exploring how private markets are evolving as we enter the decade’s second half. Across the series, we unpack how managers can adapt, attract capital and deliver performance in an increasingly complex market.

Joining us are three guests from Manulife Investment Management: Erin Patterson, global co-head of research and strategy; Maggie Coleman, the firm’s chief investment officer for real estate equity and co-head of global portfolio management; and John Anderson, global head of corporate finance and infrastructure. They discuss how multi-product managers have an advantage in expanding into new opportunity sets and argue that a multi-product approach offers obvious benefits around diversification, while allowing managers the flexibility to pivot into new opportunity sets.