Private credit: why an unwind wasn't surprising

Wilf sits down with Tony Yoseloff, executive managing member and CIO of Davidson Kempner, to explore how one of the world’s most enduring alternative asset managers navigates today’s markets. Tony, who manages around 40 billion dollars across opportunistic credit and event-driven strategies, shares his macro framework for the current environment, comparing it to both the 1970s and the early 2000s, and discusses how market concentration, rate shocks and a potential Iran-driven oil spike could shape inflation, interest rates, recession risk and the opportunity set in credit. 

Tony also gives his take on the much-debated private credit boom and emerging unwind, and why he sees direct corporate lending as a only mid single-digit return asset class that has been oversold to investors. He thinks default rates have already risen to 5 or 6%, and reflects on which parts of private credit are most exposed, most notably software companies, which often lack hard assets to sell for recovery when things go south.

Tony  reflects on the balance needed between  art and science for event-driven investing, and uses the recent takeover battle surrounding Warner Brothers Discovery as a case study for how to arbitrage specific market events, and why it is attractive to investors to have exposure to investments with zero beta, and unrelated to the rest of their portfolio.

Tony also argues that US investors have become too inward looking, and shares why he thinks India is particularly attractive, especially  for credit where it has been overlooked.

Tony closes with a piece of investing advice he uses internally: always know in advance how and why you might lose money, and size and select positions with that probabilistic reality in mind. 

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