What Matters Now in Private Markets: Eight Takeaways from SuperReturn 2026

Each June, SuperReturn International brings together much of the global private markets industry in Berlin, where GPs, LPs, advisers and other market participants compare notes, test assumptions and exchange ideas about where the industry is headed. I have set out my eight personal takeaways for private markets professionals and advisers from the conference below.

1. Onshoring and industrial resilience

The defining shift in investment focus was the extent to which resilience and onshoring have replaced lean manufacturing and international supply chain management as the organising principle of industrial strategy. The corresponding build-up of a domestic industrial manufacturing base is seen as critical and as a generational investment opportunity. Defence technology is a notable growth area as conflicts multiply. Energy independence sits alongside it, with data centres described as the "new oil" powering the next technological revolution. Critical minerals mining and refining complete the picture. Taken together, this represents capital reorganising itself around a new set of priorities.

2. The competition for proprietary data

Every GP at the conference marketed its proprietary data sets and sources as better and more complete than those of its peers. Remarkably, everyone's data appeared to be above average. With AI, the pitch sharpens: results will be better because the manager owns and controls the data on which the models are trained and deployed. Professional services firms, including those in the legal sector, are making the same argument in relation to their own AI offerings. Meanwhile, the technology teams at GPs that help portfolio companies implement AI-driven solutions are expanding rapidly, and firms are promoting their ability to deploy lessons learned across an entire portfolio as a differentiator in its own right.

3. The growing pains of democratisation

The "democratisation" of private markets is no longer the discussion point it was last year. It has happened. The conversation has moved on to its growing pains: retail investors in public funds that invest in private markets are seen as not yet fully understanding the semi-illiquid nature of the product they have purchased. Redemption fees and limits, which can run as high as 5%, are generating real investor frustration. Education, it seems, has not kept pace with distribution.

4. Scale and consolidation

Scale matters, and consolidation across the industry is expected to continue. The argument is reinforced by the proprietary data edge that many GPs are touting. If data is the moat, the largest data portfolios will dig the deepest moats. Expect fewer, larger platforms.

5. Sport as an emerging asset class

Sport is the new "in" asset class. It is no longer merely a passion project for the trophy investor, but a source of genuine value creation in an environment where people pay a premium for live experiences. Scarce franchises, captive audiences and media rights make for an unusual combination of trophy asset and yield.

6. Relationships and the limits of "proprietary" deal flow

Every GP argues that relationships matter in order to do deals. Privileged access, carefully cultivated over years, is said to create proprietary deal flow. And yet one panel also agreed that the most overrated word in private equity today is "proprietary". Both propositions can be true: the relationships are real, but the exclusivity is often aspirational.

7. AI: Too fast, too risky, or too expensive?

The mood around AI has shifted. While some GPs continue to work hard with portfolio companies on adoption, for others the emphasis has already moved from incentivising adoption to controlling costs, and "token maxxing" has entered the vocabulary.

As one speaker argued candidly, most people still use AI merely as an enhanced search engine. The full potential is yet to be realised, the real transformation is yet to come, and we do not yet know what the AI businesses of the future will look like. Security, trust and scalability remain the principal open questions. Generative AI is impressive; implementing it usefully within an organisation, to improve efficiency at an acceptable price point is the real challenge.

One provocative view from the floor was that open-source Chinese models will win out over American frontier models on cost. The argument ran that American models are subsidised and that price increases are inevitable, while Chinese models are cheap and only three months behind.

For the more advanced private equity firms, a key focus is how to secure access to sufficient tokens, that is to say compute, for their portfolio companies.

A more optimistic message on human involvement in the AI revolution was that knowledge workers remain in demand. Insurance underwriting was the example cited, where complex risk only becomes understandable with the assistance of LLMs, yet still requires a human to underwrite it.

8. GP-led secondaries and continuation vehicles

The GP-led secondaries market and continuation vehicles still struggle to shed their reputation as a home for investments that GPs are unable to sell. Despite that, the underlying arithmetic is hard to argue with: the long average holding period of private equity fund investments is likely to generate a substantial secondaries market in the years ahead. Reputation lags reality, but volume tends to settle the argument.