Private credit fundraising outside the 5 largest managers nearly halved in a year. Squire Patton Boggs assembles the data in a recent client alert testing the headlines against reported figures. That cohort raised US$32.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026, down from US$64.3 billion a year earlier. Managers raising between US$500 million and US$5 billion took the sharpest hit, at roughly 60% less capital. Average fund size in the cohort slipped from US$1.1 billion to US$0.9

Distributing private markets products to the wealth channel demands a firmwide operational and cultural commitment that most asset managers underestimate, and firms without top-down support should stay out. Ava Mallin, Managing Director of US Private Wealth Solutions at Ardian, argues this in a conversation recorded live at iCapital Connect on Alt Goes Mainstream. Private wealth is complex and expensive, she says, requiring operational overhauls and increased distribution spe

The Financial Stability Board's report on vulnerabilities in private credit, unpacked in EY's latest analysis, marks a shift from watching the market to testing it. Regulators have stopped asking whether private credit should keep growing. They are now asking whether firms can prove how it is valued, funded, and sold. The growth figures are the easy part of the story. The harder part is that a $2.3 trillion asset class has never run through a full credit cycle, and the data n

PitchBook's Q2 2026 Global Private Market Fundraising Report shows global private capital fundraising heading for a fifth straight annual decline. Managers raised $658.1 billion across 1,499 funds in the first half, and trailing 12 month capital is down 12.7% while fund count is down 37%. The gap between those two figures is the real story. Capital is not leaving the asset class so much as consolidating into fewer, larger vehicles run by established managers. Private debt is

Companies now stay private 13 to 14 years while funds last 10 to 12. NewView's Ravi Viswanathan argues company-led tenders, blessed by CEOs and sized at 10 to 30% of vested equity, become venture's liquidity layer as DPI stays near 9%.

The private equity model needs 20 to 25% annual DPI and the industry delivers about 10%. Permira's Dipan Patel explains how the firm realized 22% of NAV in 12 months by owning under-levered, under-margined, over-growthed businesses that strategics want to buy.

Founders Fund was roughly the 30th investor in Airbnb and made the second most money on it. GPx co-founder Brian Singerman argues the share of a fund behind a winner, not ownership, drives venture returns, and that concentration only works for managers honest enough to sit out when they are unsure.

Private equity's $4 trillion unrealized stack will grow before it shrinks, panelists at the Milken Global Conference argue. With distribution yields down from 25 to 28% to 12%, continuation vehicles, NAV lending, and insurance balance sheets are now permanent parts of the exit market.

The most important number in Moody's Analytics' mid year US credit risk outlook for 2026 to 2027 is not the falling default rate. It is the gap between public BDCs and the Baa rated corporates they are built to resemble, which widened to the largest on record in the second quarter

Canada barely borrows private credit, and it owns a great deal of it. Non bank lenders supply about 15% of the external funding of Canadian businesses, a share that has not moved in a decade, while Canadian institutions have quietly built roughly $500 billion of exposure to the asset class abroad.

Pension funds and endowments moved into private equity to close a gap opened by falling Treasury yields. With yields back near 4.7 percent, record dry powder, and $350 billion of aging buyout assets awaiting exit, Morgan Stanley's Counterpoint Global argues future returns must come from operating improvement rather than cheap debt.

The private credit shakeout will sort managers by funding source rather than by underwriting quality alone. Kevin McKeon, Head of the US Financial Services Practice at Odgers, makes the argument on Leading Through Uncertainty.

Private equity's core promise held for roughly three decades and then broke. Steven Kaplan of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, whose analysis of US buyout funds anchors a report on Bloomberg Television, finds outperformance against public markets running from the 1990s through 2018 and reversing from 2019. Two forces did it. Big tech pushed public market returns higher, and the prices paid during the boom made positions harder to exit. The result sits in in

Capital concentration at the top of infrastructure has become the middle market's structural advantage rather than its problem. Stuart Waugh, Managing Partner of Northleaf Capital Partners, argues this in an interview on the How I Invest Podcast.

The stress surfacing across private markets is a dispersion problem inside portfolios, and the era when weak managers posted numbers close to strong ones has closed. Tony Tutrone, Global Head of Private Markets at Neuberger Berman, argues this in an interview on CNBC.

The expansion in private credit that matters is happening above the middle market, in investment grade rated assets currently sitting in liquid public markets. John Waldron, President and COO of Goldman Sachs, makes the case on The Bridge by iCapital.

AI readiness has moved into entry diligence, and it now helps decide whether a deal proceeds at all rather than what happens after close. Rachel Barton, Global Lead for CEO Advisory and Private Equity at Accenture, argues this in an episode of Private Markets 360. Buyers are applying digital maturity and AI disruption assessments alongside standard diligence, testing data quality, technology architecture, and whether the business itself is a plausible casualty. The trigger wa

The binding constraint in private markets has moved from raising capital to originating assets, and firms that keep organizing around fundraising are solving a problem that no longer exists. Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management, argues this in an interview with iCapital CEO Lawrence Calcano on The 19th Hole.

Space companies raised more in six months than in all of last year, and the money went to production capacity rather than to technical novelty. First half investment reached $11.3 billion across 244 deals, above the $10.1 billion invested across 433 deals in 2025, according to PitchBook's 2026 Vertical Snapshot: Space Tech, published August 25 under the subtitle Capital moves to the factory floor.

European founders are raising larger rounds at lower prices, and their American counterparts are doing precisely the reverse. Median European deal value rose 25% year on year to EUR 2.5 million while the median European pre money valuation fell 5.4% to EUR 7.5 million, against US deal sizes down 13.5% and US valuations up 45%, according to PitchBook's Q2 2026 European VC Valuations Report, published August 20. That divergence repeats inside Europe itself. Pre seed and seed va