Evergreen fund AUM hit $344B by end of 2024.

Pitch: simplified exposure, periodic liquidity, low lift.
Structure: >3% annual fees, embedded leverage, complex NAV dynamics.

Private credit delivered 9.3% annualized over 5 years.
Secondaries led at 11% — driven partly by NAV discount arbitrage.
Real estate lagged at 4%, below public REITs.

Roughly 5% of funds have lost money since inception.
Return dispersion is wide, even inside single strategies.

Meanwhile, product momentum is accelerating.
Interval and tender offer launches are pacing ahead of last year’s record.
Wealth channel inflows are expected to surpass $1T globally in the coming cycle.

That scale makes standardization critical.
But benchmarks often mismatch.
Many funds report relative to public indexes — while holding private credit, CRE, or secondaries.

Peer-based indexing by strategy and structure is overdue.
Morningstar’s effort to define this baseline is a step forward.

Evergreen design isn’t the issue.
Opacity is.

Without consistent comparisons, it’s hard to assess whether these structures deliver on the promise.

And in a semi-liquid product, the cost of being wrong shows up slowly.

#finance #credit #privateequity #secondaries