Goldman crowned top secondaries fundraiser

Private Equity International's latest ranking of the world's largest secondaries fundraisers puts Goldman Sachs at the top, a result its Side Letter frames as "Goldman's crown" without releasing the underlying survey figures. The ranking lands just as secondaries capital has outgrown its deal flow. Record fundraising, as this publication has argued, is compressing returns at the quality end and pushing the market beyond vanilla purchases into NAV loans, collateralized CFOs, and minority-stake sales as exit workarounds.

Goldman's place at the top speaks to fundraising power, not deployment skill, and for limited partners the more useful read is what that raised capital is chasing. With so much of it hunting the same finite pool of quality assets, pricing skill has become the scarce resource. A fund's size in a fundraising league table says little about its ability to price a continuation vehicle or a strip of LP positions correctly.

The funds that do that work well are the ones LPs will want to be with when the next ranking comes around. The next league table will show which of them earned repeat commitments by pricing those NAV loans and continuation vehicles well, rather than simply raising the most capital.