FT称私募信贷基金赎回压力为二级市场投资者带来机会

Stressed private credit funds are an opportunity for secondary investors
Markets, like nature, abhor a vacuum. So when there is a surfeit of sellers, a new coterie of buyers will emerge. That’s what is happening in the private credit space, where a relatively new asset class — the private credit secondary fund — is set to take advantage of recent disruptions.
Private credit secondaries, like their namesakes in the private equity world, mostly pick up assets that others need to offload. That can mean buying stakes in funds from investors who want out, or buying loans that are housed in the fund and that the manager would like to turn into cash.
Demand for that sort of liquidity is increasing. Older private credit funds aimed at institutional investors need to return cash to their investors. And semi-liquid funds aimed at retail investors have suffered a stampede of exit requests.
Investors, concerned that the underlying loans may be overly exposed to AI-threatened software stocks, have been asking managers to redeem much more than the quarterly 5 per cent of net asset value that semi-liquid funds usually promise. Even though outflows were mostly restricted to this level, investors pulled a net $1.8bn out of the 10 largest credit funds in the first quarter, according to Morningstar.
The question for semi-liquid fund managers is how to manage such requests. A quarterly 5 per cent is a fifth of the fund per year: yields, loan turnover and on-hand liquidity may need supplementing if the outflows are prolonged. Hence the opportunity for secondaries investors. They can either turn hostile and try to take advantage of the stampede to buy loans directly from spooked retail investors — a strategy Boaz Weinstein unsuccessfully tried at Blue Owl — or pitch themselves as liquidity providers to the fund managers.
Selling a strip of loans to a special purpose vehicle capitalised by a secondary investor isn’t a bad way for a semi-liquid fund to secure access to more cash, especially if it gets to keep management fees on the loans. And, depending on the pressure that the specific fund is under, buyers may be able to extract a good deal. Even if the loans are priced at NAV, buyers can hammer down their effective entry point by deferring payment, for example.
It may help that, despite rapid growth, there are still not many private credit secondary funds around. Ares Management raised a relatively large $7bn from institutional investors earlier this year. Overall, assets under management are in the tens of billions, compared with well over $2tn for the private credit industry.
Even unstressed semi-liquid funds may benefit from having the option to raise extra cash. There is at least an argument to be made that investors, clocking the crush for the door, are asking for more money than they hope to receive. Should funds decide to redeem more than 5 per cent of NAV, it might help deflate headline requests, too.
Carve-outs of loans from semi-liquid funds are a new phenomenon. And, should the underlying credit quality be an issue, they would simply be moving the problem around. Still, they look like a useful addition to the toolbox given how far private credit has ventured down the retail path.