"There is always a story."
This one begins in two markets that used to live apart.
On one side, the public markets — liquid, transparent, built for speed.
On the other, the private markets — locked up, opaque, built for patience.For decades the roles were clear.
Pensions, endowments, and insurers tied up capital for ten years or more, earning the illiquidity premium for their discipline.
Retail investors stuck with liquid mutual funds, happy to trade away higher returns for the ability to exit at will.
Two worlds, two sets of rules.But stories shift. And this one is shifting now.Liquidity terms once reserved for mutual funds are creeping into private structures.
Valuations once guarded and opaque are edging toward reference pricing.
Products once designed for institutions only — held for years, disclosed sparingly — are being re-engineered for the wealth channel.
The distribution wall is flattening.
The line between public and private is fading.The pitch is access. The promise is scale.
But access has consequences.Retail capital doesn’t think in decades. It wants liquidity quarterly, even monthly.
Yet the assets haven’t changed. You can’t sell an office tower, a private loan, or a mid-market company at the flick of a switch.
And so the structures bend. Continuation vehicles. NAV loans. Secondaries.
Each designed to buy time, to provide the illusion of liquidity while the assets wait for a real exit.But redemption queues grow. Borrowing bases shrink.
NAVs say “stable” while secondaries whisper “discount.”
The pressure builds quietly, until it doesn’t.Public markets prize liquidity.
Private markets reward you for giving it up.
Now those logics are colliding — in interval funds, evergreen vehicles, semi-liquid hybrids.
The upside: broader distribution, scalable fees, more clients in the tent.
The risk: erosion of the very illiquidity premium that made private markets worth the wait.Liquidity relief always runs out.
When it does, forced sales follow.
And what was engineered as flexibility hardens into rigidity.The secondaries market becomes both pressure valve and scoreboard, marking in real time what assets are truly worth.
Liquidity has a price — and lately, that price is rising.Apollo is pushing tradable private credit.
Blackstone, Vanguard, Wellington, State Street, BlackRock — all packaging private exposures with a sheen of liquidity.
But a redemption schedule doesn’t care that it takes months to sell a private loan or a building.And when the machinery falters — when advance rates are cut, redemptions spike, tenders come at discounts — the marks become unavoidable.
At scale. Across vintages. Across strategies.The story closes with a paradox:
Private and public markets were designed to be different.
But as they converge, private assets begin to behave like public ones.
And the premium for patience may be gone.
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