StepStone publishes a secondary market read, not a volume count

The record

StepStone Group, a private-markets investment and advisory firm, publishes recurring commentary on secondary market conditions rather than a single named annual report. Its 2025 Private Equity Market Outlook, dated 20 February 2025, states that 'LPs are increasingly turning to co-investments and secondaries to optimize liquidity, reduce fees and manage potential J-curve effects,' and lists secondaries among the ways both seasoned and newer LPs access private equity. A later post dated 30 January 2026, in which StepStone partner Matt Roche discusses continuation vehicles, states that 'growing supply and slower private equity distributions are shaping opportunities for buyers.'

What the sources establish

Both documents are StepStone's own commentary, current as retrieved on 16 September 2026, and both describe conditions rather than publish a quantified transaction-volume series of the kind an intermediary like Jefferies or a survey firm like Setter Capital produces. The outlook page frames secondaries as a liquidity tool for LPs facing slower exits; the continuation-vehicle piece frames the same conditions, slower distributions and rising deal supply, from a buyer's perspective. Neither page states a total dollar figure for secondary market volume, a survey sample, or a stated methodology for how StepStone counts a transaction.

Scope and revision

This is a real distinction between providers, not a gap in research: StepStone's public secondary-market content, as published, is qualitative outlook and allocator commentary, while other firms in this pack, Jefferies' advisory-based volume review and Setter Capital's buyer survey, publish an explicit number with a stated definition and period. A reader should not treat StepStone's commentary as comparable to either kind of volume estimate, and should not assume StepStone withholds a number that it has, in fact, not published on these pages. StepStone's fuller secondaries research, where it exists, is distributed as gated whitepapers and video content that this pack could not open and does not cite.

The decision in front of you

An LP or GP using StepStone's commentary should treat it as one asset manager's read on market conditions, useful for context on why continuation vehicle supply is rising, and should look elsewhere, to a named volume report, for a transaction count or dollar total. Editorially, pairing a qualitative outlook like this with a quantified report from a different provider is a reasonable way to triangulate a claim, provided the two are not presented as one figure.

• Does the StepStone commentary you are citing state a number, or a directional read on conditions such as liquidity or deal supply?
• Are you treating StepStone's outlook as corroboration for a volume figure from another provider, or mistakenly as a volume figure itself?
• Has the date on the specific StepStone page you are citing been checked against more recent commentary that may supersede it?

Not every private-markets publisher measures the secondary market the same way, and a data desk should say so rather than force two different kinds of document into one number.