48 funds recorded in this asset class, with redemption terms and ongoing costs from the PRIIPs KID. Straight to the fund list ↓
By Niko Hatziiosifidis · last reviewed 23 Aug 2026
Private equity means taking stakes in companies that are not listed on an exchange, with the aim of making them more valuable over a period of years — the return comes from buying, developing and selling, not from trading day by day. A semi-liquid fund gives you that business in an open-ended wrapper: your money is invested straight away, the fund runs indefinitely, and on set dates you can redeem a limited amount at NAV. For that to work, evergreen PE funds build their portfolios differently from classic closed-end funds — above all with secondaries and co-investments instead of freshly launched individual funds. This construction is exactly what you need to understand in order to judge what is on offer.
35 of the 48 private-equity funds recorded redeem quarterly; the median ongoing cost ratio is 2.53% p.a.
n = 48 · cost median from 31 funds that disclose costs · calculated from our fund database · as at Aug 2026
Private Equity (PE) means a stake in unlisted companies — with the aim of making them more valuable. The return does not come from buying and selling day by day but from work on the company:
The variants differ above all in how mature the companies are and how you invest:
Majority takeover of mature, established companies — often partly debt-financed (a “leveraged buyout”). The fund calls the shots and actively reshapes the business. The heart of most PE funds.
Minority stakes in companies that are already growing and usually profitable, and that need capital for the next step. Less risky than venture, more dynamic than buyout.
Capital for young start-ups in their early stage. Many fail, a few become very large — the return hangs on the outliers. High upside, high risk.
Purchase of existing fund units from other investors, often at a discount. You buy into ready-made, already invested portfolios — that spreads risk widely and skips the “J-curve”: the typical early years in which costs come first, before gains become visible.
A fund that itself invests in many individual PE funds. Maximum diversification across managers and strategies — in exchange you pay two fee layers.
Investing directly alongside a fund in a single company — usually at lower fees, but more concentrated and therefore riskier.
Semi-liquid PE funds often hold secondaries and co-investments — they produce valuations and cash returns sooner than freshly launched single funds.
A classic closed-end PE fund has a enviable problem that you, as the investor, carry: it calls your money down over years and invests it piece by piece. An evergreen fund has the opposite problem — it takes your money today and has to put it to work briskly, otherwise cash sitting idle eats into the return (cash drag). At the same time it needs a liquidity buffer so that it can meet redemptions. Out of this tension follows, almost inevitably, the typical evergreen construction: a high proportion of secondaries and co-investments, supplemented by direct stakes and the odd commitment to a primary fund.
Why these two building blocks in particular? Secondaries — buying existing fund stakes from other investors — solve three evergreen problems at once: the money is invested straight away rather than called down over years, you buy a finished, broadly diversified portfolio across many companies, managers and vintages, and you skip the J-curve, because the target funds’ expensive early years are already behind them. Then there is the price: secondaries usually trade at a discount to the last reported NAV — although top funds and individual GP-led deals also fetch prices close to or above NAV. In 2025 average prices for LP portfolios were, according to Jefferies, 92% of NAV for buyout, 91% for private credit, 78% for venture/growth and 70% for property (Jefferies Global Secondary Market Review, January 2026). The discount moves with the cycle: buyout was marked at 91% in 2023 and 94% in 2024. Co-investments, in turn — investing directly alongside another fund — are usually offered to LPs without a second layer of fees, and can likewise be put to work quickly.
The scale behind this is considerable. With transaction volume of around US$240 billion, the secondary market had a record year in 2025 (+48% against US$162 billion in 2024; Jefferies, Jan 2026). And semi-liquid vehicles have long since become defining buyers: evergreen structures accounted for just under a third of all secondaries fundraising in 2024; in 2025 an estimated US$113 billion flowed to them, of which around 41% went into secondaries (Jefferies, Jan 2025 and Jan 2026). In total, evergreen funds manage just under US$700 billion on Hamilton Lane’s estimate — around 5% of the private markets; between 2017 and 2023 alone, 415 new vehicles were launched (Hamilton Lane, 2025 Market Overview).
For you this means two things. First: in practice a semi-liquid “private equity fund” is often rather a secondaries-and-co-investment fund — that is not a case of mislabelling, it is the construction that fits the open-ended wrapper, but it is a different product from the buyout fund the newspaper articles are about. Second: entering at a discount is a genuine advantage, but not a gift — the market is also pricing in the fact that reported NAVs embody expectations, fees and capital that is tied up.
A growing part of the secondary market consists of so-called GP-led transactions, continuation funds above all: a fund manager sells a company out of a fund that is running off — but not to a third party, rather to a new vehicle that it manages itself. The existing investors can take their money out or roll over; the price is validated by specialist secondary investors acting as anchor buyers. In 2025 GP-led deals amounted to US$115 billion (+53%), around 29 transactions passed the billion mark, and continuation funds holding just a single company made up more than half of continuation fund volume for the first time (Jefferies, Jan 2026). Why this concerns you: many semi-liquid PE funds invest in precisely such deals — they give access to companies the manager demonstrably knows and wants to keep. At the same time the same manager sits on both the buy and the sell side, a structural conflict of interest that has to be controlled through independent price validation and committees. Whether and how a fund uses continuation funds is set out in the prospectus and in the quarterly reporting.
Whether private equity really does earn more than the equity market after costs has been disputed among researchers for twenty years — and you should know both sides, because marketing material usually shows only one. The standard measure is the Public Market Equivalent (PME): you work out what the same cash flows would have earned in an equity index — in the form used today, established by Kaplan and Schoar in 2005. The findings: Harris, Jenkinson and Kaplan showed, on data now covering more than 1,800 funds, that US buyout funds of vintages before 2006 beat the S&P 500 after costs by an average of roughly 3–4% a year — for vintages from 2006 onwards, however, returns were roughly at market level (Harris/Jenkinson/Kaplan, 2014/2016). Ludovic Phalippou puts it more pointedly: since 2006, he argues, PE funds have paid back around 1.5 times invested capital net — some 11% p.a., and thus roughly as much as comparable equity indices — while the industry collected around US$230 billion in performance fees alone (“An Inconvenient Fact”, 2020). AQR too (Ilmanen et al., “Demystifying Illiquid Assets”) holds the expected net advantage to have shrunk — and suspects that many investors value the smoothed valuation itself as a comfort feature, and give up return for it.
The counter-position of the industry and of part of the research community: the average says little, because the dispersion between good and weak managers in private equity is exceptionally wide — manager selection and access decide more than the asset class does. The result also hangs on the benchmark index (against small caps, PE looks better than against the S&P 500), and access to the unlisted economy also has a diversification value beyond return alone. What does that mean for you? Three things. First: do not take “private equity beats equities” as a law of nature — it was measurable for a long time, but for more recent vintages it is disputed. Second: costs are the lever you can know for certain — in a debate about an edge of a few per centage points, the structure and level of fees help decide what reaches you. Third: historic peak figures in sales material almost always come from closed-end funds and top-quartile selections — they do not transfer one-to-one to a semi-liquid product.
Two funds with “private equity” in the name can be entirely different products. Here is how to find out in five minutes what is really inside: in the prospectus you will find the investment policy with its target ranges — look for the terms secondaries, co-investments, primaries (commitments to new funds) and direct investments, and note down the per centage bands. In the factsheet, the portfolio breakdown gives away the character: several hundred companies point to a fund-of-funds or secondaries focus, a few dozen to direct and co-investments; a split by vintages points to holdings of fund stakes. From the fee structure you can spot fund-of-funds constructions: two levels (target fund plus the fund of funds on top) mean the familiar double charge — our detail pages show it where it is documented. And from the type of manager: allocators buy in other people’s funds and deals and diversify to the maximum; houses with their own buyout platform often fill their evergreens by preference with their own transactions — more concentrated, but closer to the source, with a conflict-of-interest question of its own. No variant is better per se; they have different risk, cost and diversification profiles.
Evergreen PE is mostly secondaries plus co-investments. That speeds up deployment, spreads capital broadly across managers and vintages, and dampens the J-curve. Entry discounts in the secondary market move with the market cycle — a look at the current environment completes the picture.
Read the fee mechanics differently than in a drawdown fund. Instead of “2/20 on commitments”, the management fee here accrues continuously on the NAV — so the basis grows and shrinks with the value of the fund. Performance fee, hurdle and high-water mark are worth comparing fund by fund; our database reports all three.
Valuations lag. Private equity NAVs typically respond to market moves with a delay of around one quarter. Short-term performance comparisons with equity indices therefore say little — in either direction.
Look at leverage on both levels. Debt exists at company level (LBO) and sometimes additionally at fund level (credit lines). Only by looking at both levels together do you fully understand the risk/return profile.
TVPI, DPI, IRR — and why evergreen returns look different (and have to). Closed-end funds report money-weighted: IRR on called capital, TVPI (total value/paid in) and DPI (already distributed/paid in). Evergreens report time-weighted NAV returns, like a retail fund. The two are not comparable: the IRR of a drawdown fund is calculated only on capital actually invested, and can be flattered by subscription lines and early distributions — but your total wealth grows only with the money that is genuinely at work. Hamilton Lane does the arithmetic: 12% p.a. time-weighted corresponds, after eight years, to a 2.5x on the capital employed — a multiple that only around 6% of closed-end funds achieve (2025 Market Overview; a provider’s perspective). A “lower” evergreen per centage figure can therefore deliver the same terminal wealth as a distinctly higher IRR. A DPI does not exist in an evergreen; its counterpart is the redemption mechanism and the distribution policy.
Read the secondaries discount two ways. The discount is an entry advantage and a valuation signal at the same time. If a fund buys at 92% of NAV, a day-one write-up gain arises in the accounts — check whether the performance fee is payable on this unrealised uplift (see Valuation & NAV). At the same time the discount is the market’s opinion of the reported NAV: 70% for property (2025) is a more emphatic verdict than 92% for buyout.
Questions for the manager: How quickly was new money invested over the past four quarters (deployment vs inflows)? Current actual mix of secondaries/co-investments/primaries/direct against the target bands? Does the performance fee fall due on unrealised gains — including day-one uplifts from discounted purchases? Hurdle, high-water mark, clawback? Share of GP-led/continuation fund deals and how their pricing is validated? Net new money and the execution rate at the redemption dates?
An ELTIF (European Long-Term Investment Fund) is an EU fund wrapper that gives retail investors access to unlisted assets — as a PE ELTIF, therefore, to stakes in companies, often via secondaries and co-investments. Since the “ELTIF 2.0” reform (2024), open-ended, semi-liquid versions with regular redemption dates have also been possible.
There is no blanket answer — and we give no recommendations. The research is divided: older fund vintages beat the equity market after costs by a measurable margin, while for vintages from around 2006 onwards the advantage is disputed (Harris/Jenkinson/Kaplan 2016; Phalippou 2020). What is certain: the money is tied up for a long time, costs are higher than with ETFs, and the dispersion between good and weak funds is wide.
The purchase of existing fund stakes or portfolios from other investors — usually at a discount to book value (in 2025, an average of 92% of NAV for buyout; Jefferies, Jan 2026). The buyer steps into a finished, diversified portfolio and skips the early years. Secondaries are the most important building block of many semi-liquid PE funds.
The classic fund calls capital down over years, runs for approx. 10–12 years and pays back through exits; the evergreen runs indefinitely, invests your money straight away and redeems units at NAV on set dates, subject to limits. In return it holds a liquidity buffer, charges fees on the entire fund value and typically builds its portfolio out of secondaries and co-investments. The measurement of returns differs too: time-weighted NAV return instead of IRR — the figures are not directly comparable.
A new vehicle into which a fund manager sells a company out of one of its own funds that is running off, in order to hold it for longer; existing investors can exit or roll over. In 2025 such GP-led deals amounted to around US$115 billion (Jefferies, Jan 2026). Semi-liquid PE funds often appear here as buyers — price discovery and the control of conflicts of interest are the critical point.
There is no credible single figure. Over long periods, buyout funds achieved net returns in the region of equity markets plus a few per centage points — and, depending on vintage, database and benchmark index, no more than market level (Harris/Jenkinson/Kaplan 2016; Phalippou 2020). With semi-liquid funds there is a further factor: liquidity buffers and NAV-based fees change the profile. Past values are no indicator of the future.
Last reviewed: 23 Aug 2026 · Methodology · Not investment advice.
Redemption terms and ongoing costs from the PRIIPs KID · click a fund name to open its detail view. Filter and sort interactively →