Steve (Stephen) Ketchum
speaker
528 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 15 Jul
Steve (Stephen) Ketchum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
One of our big mantras is it's better to have more ideas than capital.
So why is that?
It's just a math problem, right?
When you have too much capital and you don't have enough ideas in your pipeline, it's human nature to end up convincing yourself that things that are marginal end up in the portfolio and that ends up reflecting badly on your performance.
And I think
The reason it's relevant in this conversation is, if we were sitting here a year ago, your first question would have been, Steve, do you think we're in the golden age of private credit?
And as a result, I think in some pockets of private credit, and now private credit is a $1.5 trillion asset class, so it's unfair to generalize too much, but I think there was too much capital that flowed into some of those areas, and the manifestation of that was maybe some challenging performance.
And in particular,
There's a headline every single week about the overexposure to software.
Why does that matter?
It seems pretty implicit now that AI will have some impact on some sectors of the software industry, and that seems like it may affect returns in private credit.
It goes back to, it's better to have more ideas than capital.
And it felt like from an industry standpoint, we were flipping into a paradigm where there'd be more capital than ideas.
But let's talk about software, which is there's a, not a week goes by without a headline about
the perils of being overexposed to software in the private credit business.
For us, it was less about software being bad than it was about our lack of desire to lend at six or seven or eight turns of leverage.
And the reality is because software companies were being acquired at 15 or 20 turns of EBITDA,
In order to have the privilege to lend to those companies, we had to stretch, and we weren't willing to do that.
Our objective is to have low loan-to-value, to lend at sort of four plus or minus turns of EBITDA, and by virtue of that discipline, it kept us away from software.
I will say in our performing credit business, our CLO and long-only business, we're investing in broadly syndicated loans.
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