Private Markets Profile: Megatrends Summit 2026

Following private markets tailwinds: a shrinking public equity universe, rising buybacks and companies staying private for longer, institutional investors increased allocations to private markets.

Now, the AI boom is challenging some of those assumptions. Public markets are driving returns, but capital is concentrating in a handful of mega-cap companies. As the balance between public and private ownership evolves, investors are reassessing long-held allocation models.

Explore whether the structural case for private markets remains intact, how AI is reshaping capital markets and whether portfolios built for a de-equitising world need to be revisited.

How will AI-driven value creation reshape public and private markets? Is the long-term shift towards private ownership continuing, or beginning to reverse? Where will the next generation of opportunities emerge and where is capital becoming overcrowded?

The world needs more power. Electrification, AI, data centres, decarbonisation and energy security are driving an unprecedented wave of investment through generation, storage, transmission and grid infrastructure opportunities.

Explore where investors are finding value across the energy transition, whether specialist or diversified approaches offer the best risk-adjusted returns, and which parts of the market are most likely to attract capital over the next decades.

Where is genuine long-term LP demand and opportunity? Are digital infrastructure opportunities a structural asset class? Is the super-cycle already priced in and what happens to returns if it is?

Consider how investors should navigate this vast opportunity set and what combination of investments or exposure to the clean energy transition is likely to win the day.

As an aggressively growing asset class Private Credit has firmed its place in institutional portfolios. Yet, following loose spreads, low interest rates, abundant liquidity and limited defaults, is this asset suited to being put to the test for the first time?

What does genuine workout capability look like? Can investors distinguish between managers with proven credit discipline and those that benefited from favourable conditions? And, when defaults rise, will the illiquidity premium continue to justify private market allocations?

GP-led secondaries, continuation vehicles, and NAV lending have given private markets the appearance of liquidity. With LPs navigating cashflow pressures, these tools have been a lifeline. But, as the secondaries market has grown at extraordinary speed, valuations remain largely self-reported – the same assets are increasingly trading between the same hands.

Debate and predict the outcome of secondaries in the sphere of private markets and explore how this trend will evolve.

Are these genuine portfolio management tools, or a mechanism for deferring valuation problems that will eventually have to be faced? What happens to the secondaries market in a prolonged downturn when buyers and sellers both need liquidity at the same time? And is the LP community sleepwalking into a concentration risk it hasn’t fully priced?