The mark is the floor the exit has to clear.

What did 2025 exits price at against the last mark?

Above it, most of the time, and rarely far below it. Carlyle AlpInvest reports that exits in 2025 cleared their prior quarter's holding value by an average of 7.9 percent, that 73 percent of exits priced at or above carrying value, and that only 5 percent priced more than 5 percent below it. The data is the platform's own: more than 4,300 companies profitably exited across Carlyle AlpInvest's primary, secondary and co-investment programmes over the past decade.

The shape is not peculiar to one investor. Bain and Company, on MSCI data covering global buyout exits from 2021 to 2025, puts more than 75 percent of buyout assets exiting above their next-to-final quarterly mark. Two datasets built by different people for different purposes agree that roughly three exits in four clear the mark, and the AlpInvest print adds the two numbers Bain's does not carry: how far above, on average, and how thin the tail below is.

That is the evidence usually offered in defence of private marks, and it is good evidence. The 7.9 percent average and the 5 percent tail together say that when a sponsor sells, the buyer pays about what the sponsor said the company was worth, and a little more. The question for anyone whose equity sits inside one of those companies is what the word when is doing in that sentence.

Why do exits clear the mark so consistently?

Because the sponsor chooses which companies to sell, and it has a strong reason not to sell the ones that would price below the mark. ILPA webcast polls in April 2026, as published by Bain and Company, found that more than half of fund investors lose confidence in a manager once a full exit prices more than 5 percent below the last carrying value. A sponsor that can hold, therefore holds.

The second quarter of 2026 shows the choice being made. Carlyle AlpInvest, on PitchBook data, records US buyout exits down 49 percent from the first quarter while exits in Europe, the Middle East and Africa rose 25 percent, and US buyout deal volume down 45 percent as managers absorbed higher energy prices and fading hopes of rate cuts. Companies whose exit would have cleared the mark were sold. The rest were kept, and PitchBook's count of US private-equity-backed companies waiting to be sold rose to 13,509 at 30 June 2026.

The continuation vehicle is the third option, and it prices the same way. Evercore's first-half 2026 review reports that 52 percent of single-asset continuation-vehicle volume cleared at par to the sponsor's carrying value and a further 14 percent above it, with 34 percent at a discount. A sponsor that cannot sell at the mark and does not want to hold in the old fund can now sell the company to itself, with new investors behind it, at the mark. The mark is the number every route out has to clear.

Harlan Ryker, Managing Partner, COO: "A realized exit above the mark tells you the mark was right for the companies that got sold. It tells you nothing about the ones that did not, and for the owner of rollover equity, the question that matters is which group the company is in. If a sale would clear the mark, it will be sold when the fund needs the distribution. If it would not, the likelier outcome is a longer hold or a continuation vehicle, not a discount."

Does the route out change what the mark is worth?

Yes, and the order is stable across the prints. A full exit clears the mark on 73 percent of occasions on Carlyle AlpInvest's data. A single-asset continuation vehicle clears it on 66 percent of volume on Evercore's. A multi-asset continuation vehicle clears it on 30 percent of volume, with 71 percent priced below par. And a fund interest sold by an investor in the secondary market, which is a claim on the whole portfolio rather than on one company, cleared consistently in the 90s as a percentage of carrying value in the first half of 2026.

The ordering is a diligence ordering. A trade buyer or another sponsor buying one company can test its numbers and its management team, so it pays the mark or more. A continuation-vehicle buyer can do the same for one asset and less for several. A secondary buyer of a fund interest is pricing a blind pool and takes a discount for it. The further the transaction sits from the company, the further the realized price sits below the mark.

For an owner whose equity rolled into the sponsor's deal, that ordering is the practical content of the data. The value of the rollover is not the mark. It is the mark times the probability that the sponsor chooses the route that clears it, and the sponsor's choice depends on its fund, not on the company alone.

What should an owner with rollover equity take from this?

Read the mark as the floor the sponsor needs, and read the hold as what happens when the company would not clear it. The quarterly statement that values the rollover is produced by the sponsor's valuation process, and Carlyle AlpInvest's data says that process is not generous: realized exits beat it by 7.9 percent on average. What the statement does not say is when the exit will happen, and the second-quarter figures say that timing is now the variable the sponsor is managing.

Three questions settle most of it. First, where the mark sits relative to the price the sponsor paid, because a company marked below entry is one the sponsor has every reason to hold until it is not. Second, how old the fund is and how much it has distributed, because pressure to return capital is what converts a mark into a sale. Third, whether the sponsor can raise a continuation vehicle, because on Evercore's figures that route now clears the mark two thirds of the time and resets the clock on the management equity when it does.

Carlyle AlpInvest's own reading of the second quarter is that concentration has made headline numbers a poor signpost: 0.3 percent of announced transactions accounted for 42 percent of a record quarter's volume, and the three largest buyout funds captured 35 percent of commitments. For a company in a sponsor's portfolio, the signpost that matters is narrower still. It is the last mark, the route the sponsor is likeliest to take, and whether the two of them add up to a sale.