Partners Group Narrows Fund Ambitions as $60 Million Insider Buying Defies Market Jitters

The boardroom and the trading floor are sending sharply different signals at Partners Group. While the Swiss asset manager’s stock has been pummelled to a 52-week low, its top brass has been quietly buying up shares with conviction. Chairman Steffen Meister and other executives have purchased over 60 million Swiss francs’ worth of stock since the start of June, funding the acquisitions from their own pockets. The buying spree, which follows a deepening slump in the share price, is being interpreted as a clear vote of confidence in the firm’s long-term prospects.

The stock touched an intraday low of €700.00 earlier this week before closing near €708.00, leaving it down more than 35% since the start of the year. Technical indicators underscore the severity of the sell-off: the relative strength index has plunged to 23.1, deep in oversold territory, while the shares trade roughly 20% below their 50-day moving average. Volatility remains elevated at around 53%.

The driving force behind the market’s unease is a classic private-markets headache: redemption pressure. Partners Group oversees approximately $185 billion in assets, of which $56 billion is tied up in so-called evergreen funds—open-ended vehicles that give retail investors exposure to private equity and credit without a fixed maturity date. In recent months, clients in the Asia-Pacific region have been demanding their money back at an accelerating pace.

Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Partners Group?

To stem the outflow, the firm early last month capped redemptions from its flagship Global Value SICAV at 5% of net asset value, after withdrawal requests had swelled to nearly 10%. Meister has now announced plans to shrink the target size of future evergreen fundraises, a move designed to deliver greater stability in a jittery market. He has ruled out a fundamental shift in strategy, describing the changes as a pure volume adjustment to the current environment.

Partners Group is far from alone in this predicament. Competitors such as Ares Management and Apollo Global Management have also been forced to limit payouts. Ares capped redemptions in its Strategic Income Fund at the standard 5% ceiling, while Apollo saw investors request nearly 17% back from one of its large private-credit vehicles, triggering an even stricter payout barrier. Industry watchers see the caps as a sensible precaution against forced asset sales at distressed prices.

Operationally, the focus now shifts to September 1, when Partners Group will report its third-quarter results. Analysts are forecasting full-year earnings of 45.75 Swiss francs per share and a dividend of 46.90 Swiss francs. The numbers will need to demonstrate that the proactive scaling of fund sizes and the insider cash infusion are more than just sticking plasters—and that the company can finally halt the exodus from Asia before the stock finds a sustainable floor.

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