Cash offers for shares in five private credit funds expired on 24th August at discounts averaging about 26%, running as deep as 37.1%. Against as much as $90 million of buying capacity, fewer than $5 million of orders came in. Some of the funds drew none at all.
In the same quarter, 38.1% of Blue Owl Technology Income's shares were tendered back to the fund itself. It accepted 13.1% of what was tendered.
Nearly four shares in ten wanted out at the fund's own reported value, which came in at $9.70. Almost nobody wanted out at $6.10.
The clearing price sits somewhere between those two numbers and nobody can see it.
That is the finding!! Not that the mark is wrong, and not that anyone lied. The public record does not contain the price at which enough buyers and sellers would actually meet.
Just look at what each signal measures. The issuer tender counts shares submitted at a formula price the fund had not yet set, because the second-quarter offer expired on 30th June and the $9.70 was determined on 22nd July. Only 5% of shares outstanding could be bought. Unfilled requests lapse, so nothing accumulates as a contractual backlog. The outside bid is a real price, but it moved almost no volume, so it does not establish value either.
Nobody was refused money they were owed. In fact these are quarterly repurchase offers sized at 5% under their own terms. Oaktree repurchased 6.8% and Brookfield bought a further 1.7% so every request was met, and Oaktree's second-quarter requests then fell to 4.5%. Blackstone met 7.9% in full in the first quarter using capital from the firm and its senior leaders, then prorated roughly 10.3% down to 5% in the second. Across sixteen non-traded BDCs, Fitch found requests averaging 10.3%, up from 9.7%, with ten of the sixteen rising.
Reported marks still carry information. Boston Fed researchers reported on 5th August that across 168 BDCs and nearly 890,000 loan observations the average fair value ratio stayed near 1.0 with wide dispersion, and that a one standard deviation decline was associated with roughly 50 basis points of weaker abnormal equity returns the next quarter. Payment in kind rose from about 6% to 10% while spreads narrowed about a point. Information is not the same thing as cash you can get today.
The Labor Department's 31st March proposal is asset-neutral and puts none of these shares into anyone's 401(k). It governs how a fiduciary picks options, including allocation funds that hold private assets. Its own text tells fiduciaries to weigh whether other investors' redemptions could impair liquidity, and warns that meeting withdrawals by selling the liquid sleeve can leave whoever stays overweight the illiquid part. It drew more than 47,000 comments and is still a proposal today.
That is the path. Daily liquidity on the outside, quarterly marks and capped offers on the inside, and the liquid assets sold first.
Blue Owl's next offers commence 1st September, expire 30th September, payment anticipated 30th October. Watch the request rate and the proration.
Nothing here alleges fraud, insolvency or improper valuation by anyone!!
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