Partners Group: Insiders Buy the Dip While Founders Redraw the Map

Partners Group insiders buy CHF 20M shares after 28% drop; redemption caps and short-seller report trigger panic, but management calls it overreaction.

The stock has lost roughly 28% of its value since the start of 2026, yet Partners Group’s top brass are piling in with conviction. Over the past few weeks, corporate insiders have snapped up more than CHF 20 million of their own shares. Co-founder Fredy Gantner increased his personal stake and called the sell-off a “massive overreaction”, while the company went so far as to open an extra trading window on 5 June so employees could also top up their holdings. The message is unambiguous: management believes the market has got this wrong.

What triggered the rout was a double blow in early June. First, Partners Group capped redemptions on its flagship Global Value SICAV, a Luxembourg-domiciled evergreen fund with $8.6 billion under management, after second-quarter withdrawal requests hit an estimated 9.8% of net asset value – nearly double the quarterly cap of 5%. Then came a damning report from short-seller Grizzly Research, which alleged that up to 40% of the fund’s investments were mispriced. Shares crashed 16% in a single day. Partners Group dismissed the claims as “baseless and misleading”, and is now weighing legal action for market manipulation.

The redemption caps are not limited to the SICAV. A separate Delaware-based vehicle is bracing for outflows of roughly 6% in the second quarter, while three other evergreen funds, together holding around $9.7 billion, face redemptions of between 3.5% and 5%. The company insists the move is a prudent liquidity measure, not a freeze. At a conference call on 12 June it pointed to the funds’ fivefold gross return since inception, ongoing portfolio distributions, and undrawn credit lines as evidence that the business remains sound.

Amid the turmoil, a quieter but significant structural change is under way at the top. Co-founder Urs Wietlisbach is spinning off a standalone unit from PG3, the family office he runs with fellow founders Alfred Gantner and Marcel Erni since 2013. The new entity will be headed by Jascha Forster, currently chief investment officer at the family office of billionaire Thomas Schmidheiny. Wietlisbach is seeking greater independence for his personal investments. The three founders are also working on a revised shareholder agreement to streamline future decision-making. The move adds an extra layer of internal complexity at a time when external pressure is already intense.

This is not a Partners Group-specific problem. Similar redemption caps have been introduced recently by Apollo Global Management, KKR, BlackRock and Blue Owl, first in private credit and then in private equity vehicles. A study by the Asset Management Association Switzerland found that 57% of industry professionals now view insufficient liquidity as the biggest barrier to distribution. For Partners Group, the challenge is especially acute because its push to democratise private markets attracted a wave of wealthy retail investors who are now discovering what “semi-liquid” really means.

The company is standing by its full-year guidance of $26 billion to $32 billion in gross new client demand for 2026. However, it expects net AuM growth to be dampened by 1-2% in the second half because of the evergreen outflows, with a similar drag pencilled in for 2027. Net inflows from the private wealth platform should still exceed the first-half outflows, but the market will be watching whether the redemption pressure is structural or merely seasonal.

The next big test comes on 15 July, when Partners Group publishes its half-year AuM update. Gantner has admitted that communication around the fund structures was inadequate, and the stock now trades at around €781.60 – roughly 35% below its 52-week high of €1,213.50, with an RSI of 33 flagged as oversold. Roughly 80% of Partners Group’s assets come from institutional investors, whose redemption behaviour is typically more stable. Whether that institutional base can offset the turbulence in the retail channel remains the central question for a company trying to prove that private equity and liquidity can coexist.