Are you ready to rumble?

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: secondaries continues to break new ground.

With as much as $32 billion trading hands in the first half of the year alone, deal volume looks set to surpass last year’s record high and may propel the industry into new territory.

LP portfolios, which still account for the majority of the market, show no sign of abating. According to Secondaries Investor estimates, at least 10 deals worth $1 billion or more have either traded or are in the process of closing so far this year. Who can forget American International Group’s $2.3 billion sale of fund stakes to Ardian and PineBridge Investments or Government of Singapore Investment Corporation’s sale of around $1.7 billion of stakes to Goldman Sachs Asset Management?

GP-leds haven’t failed to disappoint, either. The year began with the Park Hill-advised restructuring of three funds by Peruvian PE firm Enfoca Investments and the Campbell Lutyens-advised restructuring of Nordic Capital’s 2008-fund in March. Both deals broke new ground in size and geographic scope.

Other innovative transactions have made secondaries deals increasingly difficult to categorise, such as the Glendower Capital-led fundless sponsor restructuring with Argonne Capital, advised by Lazard; Canada Pension Plan Investment Board’s $1 billion fund of funds restructuring with the UK’s Hermes GPE, or Mercury Capital Advisors’ holding company deal in which AlpInvest provided liquidity to digital marketing assets in a holding company structure.

Did we mention the rise of single-asset restructurings?

Working out which firms and which deals deserve to be shortlisted for sister publication Private Equity International‘s 2018 Awards is no small task. Which is why we need your help.

The award categories are broken down by region – Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific – and each region contains four secondaries categories:

– Secondaries firm of the year
– Secondaries advisory firm of the year
– Secondaries deal of the year
– Secondaries law firm of the year

Our editorial team will draw up shortlists for each category which will then be put to the readers of Secondaries Investor and PEI to vote on.

While we spend our time studying the secondaries market, we can never know everything, so feel free to contact us before 16 November with details of some of the landmark events from the last 12 months. We will take these into consideration when compiling the shortlists.

You can make submissions here with details of why the nominee in each category deserves to be shortlisted. More information can be found here.

Keep your eyes on Secondaries Investor for your chance to vote in the coming weeks.

Check out last year’s winners here.