For decades, private equity operated behind a velvet rope. Access was dominated by pension funds, endowments, and ultra-wealthy investors, with multi-million-dollar minimum commitments common and capital locked up for years. The attraction was clear: performance has been highly dispersed, but top-performing managers have historically delivered returns that public markets struggle to replicate over long horizons. The trade-offs were equally clear: complexity, illiquidity, and limited transparency.

That exclusivity is now weakening. The growth engine is the private-wealth channel and a shift toward perpetual (“evergreen”) private-market vehicles. While estimates vary by definition, evergreen structures have grown to the hundreds of billions globally, and PitchBook projects wealth-focused evergreen funds could exceed $1.1 trillion by end-2029. In parallel, US policy has become more supportive: President Trump’s 7 August 2025 executive order positions access to “alternative assets” as a policy objective for retirement savers and directs the Department of Labor to clarify fiduciary processes and consider safe harbours - lowering barriers rather than immediately rewriting the rules.

Private markets are, in effect, being broadened beyond the institutional base. Whether this shift improves portfolio outcomes for individual investors or exposes them to risks they do not fully understand remains contested.

The Structural Shift:

The transition is being driven by product design: structures intended to feel less like a ten-year partnership and more like an investment vehicle with periodic entry and exit.

Traditional private equity funds are closed-end. They raise capital once, deploy it over a multi-year investment period, and return proceeds as assets are realised. Investors commit capital upfront, receive irregular distributions, and generally cannot redeem early.

Evergreen vehicles invert that experience. They raise capital continuously and typically offer periodic repurchases (monthly or quarterly), subject to defined limits. Liquidity is therefore “manufactured”: managers may maintain liquidity sleeves, match subscriptions against redemptions, and apply repurchase caps. A common structure is a limit of approximately 5% of NAV per quarter; where demand exceeds capacity, managers may satisfy requests pro-rata or defer them through gates. Blackstone’s BREIT, for example, explicitly operates within a 2% monthly / 5% quarterly repurchase framework and has enforced those limits during periods of market stress.

In stable conditions, this framework can function effectively. Under stress, it can reveal the core reality: these products are semi-liquid, not liquid. When interest rates rose sharply and property valuations reset, BREIT faced elevated redemption requests and constrained withdrawals, illustrating that “quarterly liquidity” is conditional.

Comparable dynamics are emerging outside real estate. In private credit, Reuters reported that Blackstone’s BCRED reached approximately $81 billion in assets by March 2025, reflecting substantial demand for perpetual alternatives wrappers.

Opening the Wealth Channel:

Distribution partnerships are accelerating the trend. Platforms and private banks increasingly offer private-market exposure to eligible wealth clients at minimums well below historic private-fund thresholds. Vehicles such as BREIT have used wealth platforms to broaden access over time.

EQT illustrates the distribution race. It has entered a partnership with Deutsche Bank Private Bank to make its EQT Nexus evergreen private-equity strategy available to eligible clients across select markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The implication is straightforward: in the wealth channel, distribution capability can matter almost as much as investment performance.

The appeal is intuitive. Wealth managers position private markets as both a diversifier and a source of returns historically associated with institutional portfolios. The risk is equally intuitive: institutions are structurally prepared for illiquidity, complex fees, and model-based valuation practices; many retail investors are not.

Dechert’s 2025 Global Private Equity Outlook captures the direction of travel: 66% of surveyed firms expect increased scrutiny from antitrust/FDI and related regulators to negatively affect dealmaking. As private markets broaden to new investor segments, suitability standards, disclosure quality, valuation practices, and liquidity terms become central regulatory concerns rather than technical footnotes.

The Valuation Question:

Closed-end funds typically report quarterly valuations based on GP methodologies that draw on comparable transactions, public-market reference points, fundamentals, and third-party inputs. The system works largely because the investor base expects estimates rather than market-clearing prices.

Evergreen products face a different behavioural constraint. When investors can redeem at stated NAV, valuation lag becomes a practical - not merely academic - issue. During BREIT’s redemption wave, critics argued valuations adjusted too slowly to changing market conditions, raising a first-mover problem: if NAVs are optimistic, early redeemers may exit on more favourable terms than those who remain. That dynamic can itself encourage redemptions at precisely the moment the vehicle needs stability.

The Fee Debate:

The traditional “2 and 20” frame remains a reference point, but comparisons are less clean in perpetual vehicles because economics differ across share classes, fee layers, and performance fee mechanics. BREIT, for example, discloses a 1.25% management fee alongside a performance fee structure in its SEC filings, underscoring that semi-liquid wealth products can remain meaningfully expensive.

The relevant question is not whether fees are inherently “good” or “bad”, but whether net-of-fee outcomes justify:

• liquidity that can be constrained during stress,

• valuation opacity relative to public markets, and

• the behavioural risk of selling “quarterly liquidity” in a way that investors interpret as “on-demand liquidity”.

Looking Ahead:

The democratisation trend is unlikely to reverse. Regulatory signals are becoming more enabling in tone - particularly the 7 August 2025 executive order’s push toward clearer fiduciary pathways - though implementation will determine the extent of adoption in retirement channels.

At the same time, the secondaries market is expanding, in part because it provides a pressure valve for the liquidity constraints that evergreen vehicles make more visible. Reported secondary-market volume reached approximately $102–103 billion in H1 2025, a record first half.

The unresolved issue is the stress test: can semi-liquid structures manage the next severe downturn without widespread gating that damages investor confidence and prompts regulatory backlash? The recent crypto drawdown - around $1.2 trillion erased from total crypto market value over six weeks - offers a simple reminder of a general principle: in periods of panic, demand for liquidity becomes highly correlated.

The core question is therefore not whether private markets will broaden beyond institutions. That is already occurring. The question is whether the industry can expand access without overselling liquidity - especially when liquidity is most valuable precisely when it is least available.