Why the booming secondaries market is hard to quantify

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The secondary market is an elephantine black box.

This market is enormous, growing rapidly—and here’s the catch—we have no idea how large it truly is. The secondary market has boomed in recent years, fueled by a straightforward issue: companies are remaining private for longer, exit opportunities have diminished, and investors need creative methods to distribute cash back to their limited partners (LPs).

New data from PitchBook estimates that U.S. direct secondary trades totaled between $62.5 billion and $120.9 billion in 2025. That $58-billion-plus range is substantial, but more notably: its margin of error is larger than the size of many entire markets. (For context, the global total addressable market for soap is roughly $50 billion.) A point of comparison: the total volume for all secondary trades in 2024 was $50 billion.

PitchBook has valid reasons for keeping its estimates wide. Despite its growth, the secondary market is structurally opaque. There are minimal rules mandating disclosure, so investors—often small firms or high-net-worth individuals—frequently purchase shares with incomplete information. The fear of missing out (FOMO) dynamic here isn’t all that different from public markets: if you’re bullish on OpenAI, you want a piece of it—just like someone buying a public company’s stock because they believe in the brand.

The key difference, of course, is that no transactions are publicly reported. Some deals are executed through large institutions (, , and all made acquisitions in 2025 to strengthen their secondary market operations). These Wall Street-channeled deals cater to major players—think a few-hundred-million-dollar stake in a firm like Anduril. But a large portion of the market operates through smaller entities, sometimes just one or two individuals, brokering deals for buyers looking to invest a couple hundred thousand dollars.

This is where the market becomes lopsided: nearly everyone is chasing a small number of companies. PitchBook notes that the top 20 startups on the private stock platform Hiive made up an astounding 86.4% of secondary trading value in the fourth quarter of 2025. The top five (including OpenAI and SpaceX) accounted for 55.6% of that volume.

So, just how large is the secondary market? What can we actually confirm right now? PitchBook uses the midpoint of its range—$91.7 billion—then adds its estimate for GP-led venture secondary volume ($14.6 billion). That brings the 2025 U.S. venture secondary market size to $106.3 billion.

And this figure is almost certainly an underestimate. We’ve lost sight of the massive entity this market has become.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
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