How we read BDC filings
In one line: every BDC figure on Oxford Ledge is read from the Schedule of Investments each business development company files with the SEC, and the pages below say how, and where each figure can mislead.
A business development company (BDC) is a fund that lends to, and sometimes invests in, mid-sized private companies. Each quarter it lists every investment in a Schedule of Investments: the borrower, the loan’s terms, the amount owed and what the fund says it is worth. The BDC pages own the numbers; these pages explain them.
The methodology pages
| Page | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Reading BDC loan data | What are the easy mistakes in reading a BDC’s loans? Four of them, each shown with a dated capture and resolved from the filing. |
| OL BDC Credit Spread Index | How much extra interest are private-credit lenders charging, across the BDCs we track? Live. |
| OL Private-Credit Stress Index | How much of those loan books is lent to borrowers that have stopped paying interest? Live. |
Both indexes are filing-lagged book figures, never a live market price. Their current values, with as-of dates and coverage, are on the credit view in the Ledge.
The terms the BDC pages use
Each term in plain words first, then what the page measures. The glossary has the longer entries.
| Term | In plain words |
|---|---|
| Fair value | What the BDC says an investment is worth, filed each quarter. It is the manager’s own estimate (a Level 3 value), not a price anyone traded at. |
| Mark | Fair value as a percent of the amount the borrower owes (par). 100 means the lender values the loan at what it is owed; 80 means 80 cents on the dollar. |
| Weighted spread as filed | The average extra interest a BDC’s loans pay over their benchmark rate (usually SOFR), weighted by each loan’s fair value, as the filing quotes it. 100 basis points (bps) is one percentage point. At some filers the quoted margin includes interest paid in kind, so the average is neither a pure cash figure nor an all-in one; the credit spread index page explains why. |
| Senior secured | Loans repaid first and backed by the borrower’s assets. The pages show the share of fair value in them, and say so when a filing leaves much of the book without a lien label. |
| Non-accrual | A loan whose interest the lender has stopped booking as income, because it doubts the interest will be paid. |
| PIK (payment in kind) | Interest paid by adding it to the loan instead of in cash. |
| Peer group and percentile | “75th pct of 22 upper mid-market peers” means the BDC’s figure is higher than about 75% of the 22 BDCs with the same strategy that report it. The groups: venture/growth BDCs lend to venture-backed and growth-stage companies; upper-middle-market BDCs lend mostly to larger private companies owned by private-equity firms; lower-middle-market BDCs lend mostly to smaller private companies and are often managed in-house; specialty BDCs hold mostly something other than ordinary company loans. A group with fewer than five reporters gets no percentile. |
| Where lenders disagree | The same borrower, at the same seniority, marked at materially different prices by two or more BDCs at their latest filings. Each mark shows its filing date, and two lenders may hold different tranches, so a gap is a question to open on the borrower’s page, not a verdict. |
| As of, and filed | The as-of date is the end of the period the figures describe; the filed date is when the BDC sent the filing to the SEC, weeks later. A page that mixes BDCs mixes quarters, and says so. |
Corrections
Every BDC figure comes from a line in a filing on SEC EDGAR, so any of them can be checked against its source. If one is wrong, write to oxfordledge@gmail.com. How we keep figures honest is in the Trust Dossier.