The Unicrunch — Slow markets, more secondaries

Secondaries continue to soar

The booming credit secondaries market, which has held the spotlight throughout 2026 due to growing liquidity needs across private credit and BDCs, looks set to keep growing.

Carlyle AlpInvest is forecasting the market will grow more than fourfold to over $80bn by 2030, from upwards of $20bn in 2025, according to its latest white paper.

There’s a slew of reasons underpinning that growth, but primarily we’re hearing that lenders are no longer able to ignore that as private equity exits remain sluggish, loans are staying on books longer than many managers anticipated when the funds were raised.

"Something has to give," one direct lender told us. "Either sponsors have to start exiting positions for us to have that natural portfolio churn or we have to come up with ways to generate some form of liquidity. I can tell you the former isn't happening fast enough, and we can't just amend and extend anymore."

There’s more secondaries supply in the market now than has been in years, but the constant question seems to be — how good are the deals that are floating around?

One common view has been that credit secondaries largely consist of aging 2020 and 2021 loans, deals that were done with docs and valuations that market participants often note were loose and overblown.

AlpInvest's review of transactions brought to market in 2025 and early 2026 found that the portfolios typically contain loans with weighted average ages of just three to four years, while some featured assets seasoned for less than two years. In many cases, between 30% to 50% of the underlying loans’ duration remained despite the originating fund approaching the end of its life.

There might be a reason for that mismatch. Sellers often need to include newer, better-performing loans alongside older positions to create portfolios attractive enough for buyers, several sources told us.

“A book that’s just comprised of assets that are over five or six years old is a much harder sell to buyers,” one advisor said. “It’s a flag for investors who have to question why those assets have hung around for so long.”

And while market participants broadly agree on the direction of travel, not every portfolio coming to market is finding a bid. A number of processes are struggling to clear because pricing expectations remain mismatched, multiple sources said. Sellers are often seeking valuations close to par, while buyers are still inclined to capture better terms.

The tension is especially evident in secondaries transactions like CVs, where LPs have increasingly pushed for additional economics or concessions from GPs before agreeing to roll assets into new structures. These deal sweeteners for LPs can include getting GPs to subordinate their own carry, as 9fin has reported.

Another potential constraint on the market’s growth could be capital. Although the amount allocated to credit secondaries funds has skyrocketed in recent years, AlpInvest estimates there is currently only around $20bn of dedicated dry powder available for the strategy. While that capital base continues to grow, the report estimates it represents just six to nine months of deployment runway at current transaction volumes.

Everyone’s in town for Melanoma benefit

A dearth of new deals continues to dominate the narrative in debt markets, giving the LevFin industry ample time to congregate in New York for an annual Melanoma benefit this week.

The Leveraged Finance Fights Melanoma event anchors a week of meetings and soirées where clients, managers and advisors can meet face-to-face.

While those meetings might start to bear capital markets fruit later in the summer, they did not indicate a breaking of the dam any time soon. One attendee said a large-cap M&A transaction in the works fell apart earlier this week. Another said their focus has shifted to restructuring, with companies increasingly approaching advisors for capital solutions advice.

At the MoMA, 9fin sat down with Jeffrey Rowbottom, the event host and managing director at General Atlantic. A melanoma survivor, he discussed why investing in early-stage cancer research has been a “life saver” for patients like himself, and why now, at a time when the government has pulled back research initiatives, it is essential for charities like his to help supply the funds.

Over the course of the evening, LFFM raised $4.3m for the Melanoma Research Alliance, which this May announced an $18.4m investment in 30 research grants.

“We're like the Knicks right now,” Rowbottom said. “We've had individual wins where lots of people’s lives have been saved, but it's not in the bag yet. So we got to keep working hard to close this out.”

And if Wednesday night’s performance says anything about surmounting improbable odds, the crowds gathered at the MoMA certainly have reason to be hopeful.

9fin whitepaper

Retail outflows, software concerns, loose documentation. We’ve been covering them all, but we recently took a step back from the day-to-day updates to understand what all of this means for the market. Check out our whitepaper, ‘The state of private credit in 2026’, to get up to speed as we enter the second half of the year.