The largest private markets firm is spending $350 million to make its assets readable every day.
The rest of the market will be read against that standard.
Apollo used its third-quarter earnings call to set out a market structure programme. Lydia Tomkiw at Pensions & Investments reports the firm will spend about $350 million over the next 24 months on daily values, standard identifiers, market making and custody and settlement for private assets. Bloomberg Law puts the same figure on the trading build-out, most of it to sit in Austin.
The plumbing is already going in. Daily values run across Apollo's credit business, its ICE partnership has put identifiers on more than 2,000 private assets, and it expects to trade more than $40 billion this year, with custody and settlement to follow in 2027. The buyers it named, individuals, insurers, asset managers and 401(k) plans, cannot hold an asset they cannot identify, price or settle. A daily value and a CUSIP are a language the rest of the system already speaks.
In our view, transparency stops being a standard firms are asked to meet. It becomes the structure they trade inside. A price that moves daily is a record that is read daily, by platforms, by allocators and by the machines that screen for both.
Audit the public record first. Apollo could only build daily pricing on a book it had already gone through. A firm that wants to be read at that speed starts the same way. What can be pulled up about the firm today is the baseline, and it should be read before it is improved.
Set one approved factual baseline. An identifier works because there is one agreed reference for the asset, no second version. The firm's facts need the same discipline: holdings, how they are valued, when they were last tested, stated once, in the same words everywhere. A firm carrying three versions of its own story cannot be standardised by anyone else.
Publish the basis, not just the number. Apollo's daily values hold up because the method behind them is stated and can be checked. A value on its own has to be believed. Transparency was never the number. It is the basis being open to checking, and a firm that publishes figures without it has not become transparent. It has just become more frequent.
Keep the record current between quarters. The Apollo move is a change of cadence, quarterly to daily. If the market reads daily, a record refreshed four times a year reads as silence the rest of the time, and the silence gets read too.
We read a private markets firm's public record. We tell the firm what it says, and we fix what fails.
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