3 Wrappers, 1 Manager: The PE Evergreen Queue Starts at Partners Group

Public sources retrieved between November 1 and 3, 2026

Last month we wrote that PE evergreens showed no queue at all. A filing we had not been tracking says otherwise, which shows there’s always room for improvement. On October 29, Partners Group Private Equity Fund, a c. $14.6bn US evergreen that has taken subscriptions since 2009, reported c. $2.2bn of tenders at its August offer and c. $0.73bn paid, pro rata. Holders asked for 3.0x what the fund would pay, a ratio we had only seen so far at the most rationed private credit funds.

What makes October unusual is that the same manager’s PE investors went looking for the exit through 3 different wrappers within 4 weeks. 74% of PEYS shareholders chose realisation, Global Value SICAV is being split by vintage pools, and the US fund rationed its tender. Meanwhile, the 10 other PE, venture and real estate results filed in October were served in full.

Our view is that the first PE queue follows the age of the money more than the state of the market. These wrappers are old by the standards of private wealth (PEYS has been listed since 2007), and the SICAV’s own plan sorts its investors by vintage. Younger evergreens have not been asked the same question yet. The view fails if one of them prorates before March 31, 2027.

No August expectation fell due; 1 of September’s 3 expectations is already refuted, by this same fund (section 8).

No adviser published a new primary estimate in October, so the H1 range of $117bn (UBS) to $124bn (Lazard) still sets the scale. The month comes from the registries.

The bottom line is that new vehicles slowed down while existing programmes filled up. The amendments carry the month: StepStone Secondary Opportunities Fund VI reports c. $3.1bn sold since March 31, StepStone VC Secondaries VII added c. $179m in 7 weeks, and Melange Secondaries Partners II is fully sold at c. $724m. October brought the fewest new secondaries vehicles since we started publishing the Monitor in August, while the amendments of existing programmes showed c. $6.3bn sold to date. That is what a fundraising market looks like after a summer of (or a glorious summer away from) formation, and we would not read the low count as a slowdown.

Credit is the exception worth flagging. After 3 credit secondaries vehicles in August and 4 in September, October brought none under our search criteria. One month does not make a trend, and most of the credit sleeves already on file have reported little or nothing sold, so the next amendments will show whether that pipeline is filling or stalling.

These counts come from selected name and text searches, which miss vehicles that avoid the search criteria and catch some unrelated entities. They are applied identically every month, which keeps the comparison with previous months valid.

No adviser published a new GP-led / LP-led split in October; the H1 figures from Evercore ($65bn GP-led against $56bn LP-led) and Lazard ($61bn against $63bn) remain the reference.

October’s largest liquidity events were redesigns of the wrapper itself, which sit uneasily in either column:

Each of these turns an LP’s wish to leave into a schedule, and none of them is likely to show up as a “transaction” in a half-year volume report. Adviser splits are built around who initiates a sale. October’s largest exits were written into the vehicles’ own documents, where neither column looks.

A GLEIF record adds a footnote. PGPE Continuation LP was created in Guernsey on September 3, 5 days before the PEYS circular, and registered on October 2. Its link to PEYS is our inference from the name and jurisdiction, and no document confirms it yet.

EnCap’s vehicle is, per Kirkland, the largest capital raise for an upstream energy continuation vehicle, and its anchor carries a name the registry already knew. MCP Management, LP is the investment manager on the Form D filings of Melange Secondaries Partners II, first filed on June 11 with c. $315m sold to 15 investors, and amended on October 29 at c. $724m from 126 investors. If the 2 entities are the same firm, which neither document states, the anchor’s capital was visible in public filings 4 months before the CV closed. We think that is how the large energy CVs get done now: a specialist secondaries pool raised in the open over a few months, then committed as the anchor of a single GP’s vehicle.

NBPE’s numbers make the case for the GP-led route better than any adviser deck. In the same announcement, OneMonroe went to a continuation vehicle 11% above its December 2025 value, while 5 other exits brought c. $81m at a 7% discount. Same seller, same month, different assets, and an 18-point gap between the 2 routes. Not a small gap for one seller in one month, and we would expect listed LPs to lean harder on GP-led exits for their best assets while the discount on their own shares stays this wide.

The registries keep showing vehicles before anyone announces them:

The underlying assets of the unannounced vehicles are inferred from their names.

October’s prices for leaving a PE position, by wrapper:

We expect that OCI’s 5.75% discount is the number that will be talked about, and it flatters the deal. Carlyle AlpInvest won the process, run by Campbell Lutyens (now part of Lazard CL, in case you did not look up your LinkedIn feed the past couple of days), and about half of the price is paid at completion, the rest over 3 years. If that deferred half came in 3 equal annual instalments discounted at 8%, OCI would receive the equivalent of c. 87.6% of the March value today, a discount closer to 12% than to 6% (the exact schedule is not in the release). Car dealers have long protected the sticker price by moving the discount into the financing terms, and secondary sellers have learned the same trick.

The Partners Group line looks the most generous and is the hardest to compare, because the holder gets NAV on a third of the request and waits for the rest.

Our September edition priced that kind of wait at c. 5 to 6 points of NAV per quarter, by dividing what holders requested by what was served. John Cox, who runs Cox Capital Partners and made the bids we were pricing, replied publicly on LinkedIn, and his correction was the right one. At a constant fill rate, the queue shrinks geometrically: a BCRED holder served at 50% still has a quarter of the position in line after 2 repurchases, and clearing 95% of it takes 5. His bid therefore prices the tail of a position, where the NAV risk sits, more than its average wait. A holder who redeems 75% at NAV and sells the last 25% at 12.5% below NAV gives up c. 3.1% on the whole position, if NAV does not move. He also pointed out that the $45m we quoted was the initial size of his offers, not his capacity. Being corrected by the bidder you are analysing is rare, and being corrected this precisely is rarer still, so we take both points.

Applied to the Partners Group fund, the same arithmetic gives a longer wait and a gentler price. At an unchanged 33% fill, clearing 95% of a position takes c. 7 to 8 quarters. A holder who takes the Q3 fill at NAV and sells the remaining 67% at Cox’s September discounts would give up c. 8 to 10 points on the whole position. No public bid exists for these units, and the discounts come from credit funds, so this is a yardstick and nothing more:

On that yardstick, an evergreen holder who stands in line and then sells the tail leaves for about what HVPE offers its own shareholders, and for about a third of what the listed market charges. We expect someone to test it with a real bid, as Cox did for the credit funds.

Valuation dates differ across both tables, from December 2025 to September 30, 2026.

Selected announced capital in October:

The registries show at least as much capital as the announcements, with less noise:

At GLEIF, LGT registered Crown Global Secondaries VII Feeder Fund in Vaduz at the end of October, and European programmes from Schou, Arcano and Altamar registered entities over the month. Truth be told, StepStone’s c. $3.1bn would rank third among the month’s secondaries raises, behind Pantheon and Ares, had it come with a PR.

Our view is that October’s buyers raised for a supply that the evergreen channel is now producing on both sides of the Atlantic. The 2 oversubscribed closes (Pantheon at 1.7x target, Ares at c. 4x) landed in the same weeks as a c. $1.5bn unserved PE queue at a single evergreen, and the wealth channel kept buying the entry with 2 new evergreen launches. Another signal that retail is here for the long run, and that its exits are becoming a source of deal flow for the institutional funds raising next door.

The lawyers moved with the money. Debevoise, where I trained as a fund lawyer at the inception of my PE journey, hired Freshfields’ private capital leadership in 2 waves: Mary Lavelle, global co-head of private funds and secondaries, in London in September, then Neal Reenan and Ian Bushner, global co-head of private capital and head of US private capital, in New York on October 5. Kirkland hired Christian Vareika for its secondaries and CV practice (Oct 27). And on October 28, Weil’s management committee recommended an orderly dissolution of the firm, with a partner vote expected in the following days.

We expect Weil’s private funds and private equity benches to be the most contested lateral market of the winter, and the firms that win them to show up next year in the legal credits of fund closes and CVs.

A public slice of October, selected from filings, regulatory announcements and the parties’ own releases: quiet processes, and deals reported only behind paywalls, sit outside it.

Evergreen funds that prorated in results filed in October:

Acceptance = accepted / tendered; demand = tendered / accepted. North Haven’s final counts confirm September’s preliminary figures and are not counted twice.

The Partners Group fund’s own history shows how fast the line formed:

Requests went from c. 6% of NAV in Q2 to c. 15% in Q3, a 2.4x jump in one quarter, which left c. $1.5bn unserved. By fund, that is the third-largest unserved queue we have measured this year, and the only one outside private credit:

LPs asking when cash will actually come back is hardly news these days (and rightfully so), and a fund that has compounded 10.2% a year over 10 years in its Class I (per its March 31 report) is precisely where that question gets asked first, because its holders have something to take home. The same report shows 5.6% over 1 year against 18.9% for the MSCI World, and that is the strongest objection to our thesis. Holders may be leaving a manager’s recent performance, which would make the queue a Partners Group fact with little to say about PE evergreens in general. The 2 explanations can coexist, and the filings do not let us separate them; the next offers of the younger PE evergreens will.

Everywhere else, PE evergreens served in full:

Private credit stays fund by fund. In the same weeks as Blue Owl’s 29.8%, Carlyle Credit Solutions received requests for only 37.3% of its cap, KKR FS Income Trust, KKR FS Income Trust Select and Vista Credit Strategic Lending served every request, and 2 funds received none.

On the offer side, 18 tender offers opened in October among the funds we track, and every cap we could locate sits at 5% of shares or NAV. A 5% cap is a promise about the maximum, which holders tend to discover in the quarter they need more.

A correction. Our September edition put Hamilton Lane Private Assets Fund’s June offer at 17.7% of its cap. The fund’s own amended final result, filed on October 8, raises the units tendered by 32% and brings the figure to 24.0%. In fund administration, “final” is a relative term. Our second miss is larger. Partners Group Private Equity Fund had already prorated its May offer, in a filing of July 29, and it sat outside the list of funds we tracked until November 1, so neither the August nor the September edition caught it. A third, on how we priced the credit queues in September, sits in section 4, with thanks to John Cox.

The strongest objection on the credit side is unchanged: when holders expect a proration, they tender more than they mean to sell, so the multiples overstate the number of people waiting.

August’s calls. None fell due by November 3:

September’s calls.

New expectations.

Also on the hot list for November: the Cox offers’ expiry on November 14; BCRED’s, ADS’s and HPS’s final Q3 counts; the Global Value SICAV shareholder vote; HVPE’s tender result; the Weil partners’ vote and where its funds lawyers land; the completion of OCI’s sale and the use of its proceeds.

This Monitor uses public sources only, retrieved between November 1 and 3, 2026: SEC EDGAR filings (Form D, SC TO-I, SC TO-I/A, N-CSR), GLEIF records, regulatory announcements of listed vehicles, issuer, buyer, seller and law-firm announcements, regulators’ releases, public adviser reports and other public documents gathered from Axorion’s research framework. Paid sources are excluded as per Axorion’s no-paid-source policy; transactions reported only by paid outlets stay out of the tape until a public primary source confirms them, and paywalls are not considered as sources.

Registry counts rely on selected name and text searches and are proxies; the EnCap vehicle, for instance, appears in none of them. The segment of each evergreen fund cited follows the investment objective stated in its latest annual, quarterly or semi-annual report. Demand as a multiple of the cap overstates intent when holders tender more than they mean to sell. The OCI effective price assumes 3 equal annual instalments, which the release does not specify. The distance from NAV of the Partners Group queue assumes an unchanged 33% fill and applies September’s credit bids to the tail of a PE position: it is a yardstick, and no bid exists. The link between MCP Management on the EnCap CV and on the Melange Form Ds, and between PGPE Continuation LP and PEYS, is inferred from names. “No announcement found” means none on the lists we read as of November 1. Listed-vehicle discounts are those each vehicle publishes, at different dates. Figures computed by Axorion show their formula. Quiet processes stay outside the record, and so does the remaining capacity inside any buyer’s mandate.

Axorion Liquidity Monitor · October 2026 · source publication dates apply