Blue Owl software lending triggers another quake in private credit

The latest tremor in the private credit world involved a deal that should’ve been reassuring to markets.

Blue Owl, a direct lender specializing in loans to the software industry, said Wednesday it had sold $1.4 billion of its loans to institutional investors at 99.7% of par value.

That means sophisticated players scrutinized the loans and the companies involved and felt comfortable paying nearly full price for the debt, a message that Blue Owl co-President Craig Packer sought to convey in interviews several times this week.

But instead of calming markets, it sent shares of Blue Owl and other alternative asset managers diving on fears of what could follow. That’s because as part of the asset sale, Blue Owl announced it was replacing voluntary quarterly redemptions with mandated “capital distributions” funded by future asset sales, earnings or other transactions.

“The optics are bad, even if the loan book is fine,” Brian Finneran of Truist Securities wrote in commentary circulated Thursday. “Most investors are interpreting the sales to mean that redemptions accelerated and led to forced sales of higher quality assets to meet requests.”

Blue Owl’s move was widely interpreted as the firm halting redemptions from a fund under pressure, even as Packer pointed out investors would get about 30% of their money back by March 31, far more than the 5% allowed under its previous quarterly schedule.

“We’re not halting redemptions, we’re just changing the form,” Packer told CNBC on Friday. “If anything, we’re accelerating redemptions.”

Coming amid a broad tech and software selloff fueled by fears of AI disruption, the episode shows that even apparently strong loan books aren’t immune to market jitters. This in turn forces alternative lenders to scramble to satisfy shareholders’ sudden demands for the return of their money.

It also exposed a central tension in private credit: What happens when illiquid assets collide with demands for liquidity?

Against a backdrop that was already fragile for private credit since the collapse of auto firms Tricolor and First Brands, the fear that this could be an early sign of credit markets cracking took off. Shares of Blue Owl fell Thursday and Friday. They are down more than 50% in the past year.

Early Thursday, the economist and former Pimco CEO Mohamed El-Erian wondered in social media posts whether Blue Owl was a “canary in the coal mine” for a future crisis, like the failure of a pair of Bear Stearns credit funds in 2007.

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that he was “concerned” about the possibility that risks from Blue Owl had migrated to the regulated financial system because one of the institutional buyers was an insurance company.

With skepticism over loans to software firms running high, one question from investors was whether the loans they sold were a representative slice of the total funds, or whether Blue Owl cherry-picked the best loans to sell.

The underlying loans were to 128 companies across 27 industries, the largest being software, the firm said.

Blue Owl indicated it was a broad swath of overall loans in the funds: “Each investment to be sold represents a partial amount of each Blue Owl BDC’s exposure to the respective portfolio company.”

Despite its efforts to calm markets, Blue Owl finds itself at the nexus of concerns around private credit loans made to software firms.

Most of the 200-plus companies Blue Owl lends to are in software; more than 70% of its loans are to that category, executives said Wednesday in a fourth-quarter earnings call.

“We remain enthusiastic proponents of software,” Packer said on that call. “Software is an enabling technology that can serve every sector and market and company in the world. It’s not a monolith.”

The company makes loans to firms “with durable moats” and is protected by the seniority of its loans, meaning that private equity owners would need to be wiped out before Blue Owl saw losses.

But, for now at least, the problem Blue Owl faces is one of perception bleeding into reality.

“The market is reacting, and it becomes this self-fulfilling idea, where they get more redemptions, so they have to sell more loans, and that drives the stock down further,” said Ben Emmons, founder of FedWatch Advisors.