Caroline Hyde

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with Caroline Hyde in New York and Ed Lovelow in San Francisco.

Yeah, I think it's fundamentally important in what's going on in private credit.

I mean, private credit and private equity to a certain extent as well, they kind of prided themselves on selecting certain industries that they considered to be anti-cyclical or non-cyclical.

And that kind of...

That kind of shrinks the pool.

And one of the kind of darlings of choice was software as a service.

And so you'll find with Blue Owl, but Blue Owl is by no means an anomaly, a big concentration of exposure to software and software as a service.

And I think with this kind of transformative paradigmatic or whatever kind of big word you want to use, effects or likely effects that AI has on that industry makes it very hard for investors to judge even, I mean, perhaps not short term, but certainly midterm and long term prospects for a lot of these businesses.

I think there's sort of several tectonic plates that are shifting under private credit.

I mean, with Blue Owl in particular and BDCs more generally, I mean, they are kind of retail-oriented funds.

And so there's a question about

investor withdrawals and kind of what happens if you have a kind of avalanche of withdrawals at the same time.

BDCs have gating systems, which Blue Owl, by the way, has redeemed every investor withdrawal so far, apart from this new one where it's shifting, it's kind of slightly complicated, but it's shifting a legacy system

finding a way of shifting a legacy system, investors outside of that system.

So, you know, there are kind of, I don't know what Bank of America's notes was specifically saying, but I mean, I think there's been a lot of noise around Blue Owl recently regarding investor withdrawals and kind of what will happen with jitteriness amongst the retail client base.

But that undergirded by, I think, a kind of

preponderance of software exposure in the dawn of AI, I think is concerning investors.

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