Setter Capital's volume report states what it does not count

The record

Setter Capital, a secondaries advisory firm, publishes an annual Volume Report; its 26th edition, covering FY 2025, states that total secondary market volume for the year was $203.76 billion. The report describes itself as a '35-question survey of the most active global buyers in the secondary market for alternative investments, conducted at the end of December 2025,' to which 97 of 143 identified buyers responded. Within that total, Setter Capital reports private equity fund secondaries of $88.15 billion in leveraged buyout funds and $7.46 billion in venture capital funds, each up roughly a third year over year.

What the sources establish

Setter Capital states its own definition of the figure it reports: 'volume is defined as total exposure (NAV plus unfunded in USD) purchased by the respondents, including only deals where a binding agreement was entered into during FY 2025.' The 97 respondents that answered the survey reported $168.96 billion directly; Setter Capital states it extrapolated the remaining $34.8 billion by 'prorating the survey results based on the proportion of small, medium and large buyers that participated,' since the 97 respondents represented an estimated 82.9 percent of total market volume. That is a stated estimation method, not a count of every transaction, and Setter Capital says so in its own text.

Scope and revision

The report states its own coverage limits without prompting: the total 'does not include the activity of over 2000 opportunistic and non-traditional buyers,' excludes named sovereign funds entirely, and, notably for this site's theme, 'does not capture the activity in the secondary market for shares in venture-backed companies.' That last exclusion matters for a founder-facing reader: Setter Capital's $7.46 billion venture figure counts secondary purchases of stakes in venture capital funds, not secondary sales of stock in venture-backed companies, which is a separate market this report explicitly does not measure. The report calls its own total 'conservative' rather than complete, and its own framing distinguishes a survey-based estimate from a transaction registry.

The decision in front of you

An analyst citing this figure should state it as Setter Capital's own survey-based estimate for FY 2025, name the $203.76 billion total and its stated exclusions, and avoid treating the venture-fund figure as a stand-in for company-share secondary activity. Comparing this total with Jefferies' $240 billion figure for the same year requires checking that both count comparable transaction types, since the two firms survey and advise on different, overlapping but not identical, sets of buyers and deals.

• Does the Setter Capital figure you are citing describe fund-interest secondaries, company-share secondaries, or both?
• Are you aware which portion of the reported total came from direct survey responses versus Setter Capital's own extrapolation?
• Have you named the survey period, end of December 2025, rather than presenting the figure as a point-in-time snapshot?

A survey-based volume estimate is only as strong as its stated response rate and its stated exclusions, and Setter Capital publishes both rather than leaving a reader to guess.