Future Standard Secondaries (formerly Portfolio Advisors)

Portfolio Advisors was founded in Darien, Connecticut in 1994, building a multi-strategy private-markets business that included secondaries, co-investments, and mezzanine debt investing for institutional clients, alongside offices in Switzerland and Hong Kong.

The firm became wholly owned by Franklin Square Holdings (operating as FS Investments) prior to 2025. In July 2025, FS Investments and Portfolio Advisors combined and rebranded under a single new name, Future Standard, creating a roughly $73 billion alternative investment firm.

The secondaries business built by Portfolio Advisors continues to operate inside the combined Future Standard platform, illustrating how quickly brand names in this corner of the industry can change even when the underlying investment team and strategy stay intact.

Formerly Portfolio Advisors, the business buys LP fund stakes and runs co-investment and mezzanine strategies, with a client base that has historically included institutions and advisory relationships. Firms with an advisory heritage bring a particular perspective: they have spent years helping investors build private-markets portfolios, which is useful context when pricing what those portfolios are worth to someone else.

Institutional sellers and their advisers dominate. It is worth knowing that most institutional secondary sales run through an intermediary who markets the portfolio to a shortlist of buyers — the price a seller achieves depends heavily on how competitive that process is, which is the single biggest controllable variable in a sale.

Secondaries desks and franchises that operate inside a larger private-markets manager, usually built by acquiring an independent specialist and folding it into a broader platform.

This site groups buyers into four categories, because the category tells you more about how a firm behaves than its size does. See the rest of theplatform within a diversified managergroup in the directory.