49 funds recorded in this asset class, with redemption terms and ongoing costs from the PRIIPs KID. Straight to the fund list ↓
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. You need to understand this construction to judge what is on offer.
36 of the 48 active private-equity funds redeem quarterly; the median ongoing cost ratio is 2.60% p.a.
n = 48 (excluding 1 fund in liquidation) · cost median from 35 funds that disclose costs · calculated from our fund database · as at Oct 2026
Private Equity (PE) means taking stakes in unlisted companies. The return comes 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.
Purchase of existing fund stakes 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 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.
A classic closed-end PE fund has an 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) — and at the same time it needs a liquidity buffer for redemptions. This leads, almost inevitably, to the typical evergreen construction: a high proportion of secondaries and co-investments, supplemented by direct stakes and individual primary fund commitments.
Secondaries solve three evergreen problems at once: the money is invested straight away, you buy a finished, broadly diversified portfolio across many companies, managers and vintages, and you skip the J-curve. Then there is the price: secondaries usually trade at a discount to the last reported NAV — in 2025 at an average of 92% of NAV for buyout portfolios (Jefferies Global Secondary Market Review, January 2026); top funds and individual GP-led deals, however, also fetch prices close to or above NAV. How the price is arrived at and how it moves with the cycle is explained in the Secondaries chapter. Co-investments are usually offered to LPs without a second layer of fees, and can likewise be put to work quickly.
The secondary market saw around US$240 billion of transactions in 2025, a record year (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, and 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).
A growing part of this market consists of GP-led transactions, continuation funds above all: a manager sells a company out of an expiring fund to a new vehicle that it manages itself. Seller and buyer are therefore the same manager — a structural conflict of interest that has to be controlled through independent price validation and committees (mechanics, volumes and governance rules in the Secondaries chapter). Many semi-liquid PE funds buy precisely such deals: they give access to companies the manager demonstrably knows and wants to keep; whether and how a fund uses them is set out in the prospectus and in the quarterly reporting.
What this means for you: a semi-liquid “private equity fund” is often more of a secondaries-and-co-investment fund — not a case of mislabelling but the construction that fits the open-ended wrapper, though a different product from the buyout fund the newspaper articles are about. And 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.
Whether private equity earns more than the equity market after costs has been disputed among researchers for twenty years — you should know both sides, because marketing material usually shows only one. The standard measure is the Public Market Equivalent (PME), established in its current form by Kaplan and Schoar in 2005: what would the same cash flows have earned in an equity index? Harris, Jenkinson and Kaplan showed, using 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 — vintages from 2006 onwards, however, 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., 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”) considers 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 has a diversification value beyond return. The upshot for you: “private equity beats equities” is not a law of nature — measurable for a long time, disputed for more recent vintages. Costs are the lever you can know for certain: when the edge is only a few percentage points, the structure and level of fees help decide what reaches you. And the standout 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 fundamentally different products. In the prospectus you will find the investment policy with its target ranges — look for secondaries, co-investments, primaries (commitments to new funds) and direct investments, and note down the percentage 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 a 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, 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.
Read the fee mechanics differently from a drawdown fund’s. Instead of “2/20 on commitments”, the management fee here accrues continuously on the NAV — 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 the two together make up the risk/return profile.
Read returns differently. Closed-end funds report money-weighted figures (IRR on called capital, TVPI, DPI); evergreens, like a retail fund, report time-weighted NAV returns. The two are not comparable: a “lower” evergreen percentage figure can deliver the same terminal wealth as a distinctly higher IRR — the arithmetic is in the Evergreen performance chapter. A DPI does not exist in an evergreen; its counterpart is the redemption mechanism and the distribution policy.
Read the secondaries discount two ways. 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 (Jefferies, 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: long lock-up of capital, higher costs than with ETFs and wide dispersion between good and weak funds.
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 shares 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 percentage points — or, depending on vintage, database and benchmark index, merely 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: 16 Oct 2026 · Methodology · Not investment advice.
Redemption and ongoing costs as on the fund pages (ongoing costs of the share class named there, from the PRIIPs KID) · click a fund name to open its fund page. Filter and sort interactively →