RT Research Terminal

Private Credit Terminal

The credit cycle, the price of private credit and the listed lenders — FRED, SEC filings and the market feed, every term defined on hover.

Credit conditions

Eight readings of where the credit cycle sits today, each placed against its own history: spreads, the base rate, the long-run risk premium, bank standards and bank losses.

How to read this

Each tile carries the latest value, a one-line reading from a fixed rule, two years of history as a sparkline and a percentile marker whose window is written on the tile — a three-year window for the ICE BofA series, because that is all FRED serves of them, and ten years where the history exists. Spreads are in basis points over Treasuries; the base rate and yields are percentages; the survey series are net percentages of banks. A tile that says "not available" names the series that did not answer rather than showing a zero.

More conditions

Listed BDCs against leveraged loans

The only daily public price of the asset class — the listed BDC ETF against a leveraged-loan ETF, five years monthly, rebased to 100.

How to read this

BIZD holds the largest listed business development companies, so its price is the market's mark on their books, months ahead of the quarterly net asset values the managers publish. SRLN (or BKLN when SRLN is not available) holds broadly syndicated loans, the liquid neighbor of a private loan. Total return uses the dividend-adjusted close and is the default, because BDCs pay out most of what they earn; the price toggle shows what the shares alone did. Shaded bands are recessions from FRED's USREC series, which runs each band from the month after the NBER peak through the trough month (FRED's trough method), so a band here starts one month later than the hand-keyed bands on the Strategy page.

Spread ladder

What each rung of the bond market pays over Treasuries today, in basis points, with the slot the site's own BDC composite will fill.

How to read this

Option-adjusted spread is the extra yield over the Treasury curve after the value of any call option in the bond is stripped out, so the bars are comparable across ratings. The order is a ladder — investment grade, BB, the high-yield index, single-B, CCC — and the gap between the top and bottom rungs is dispersion: how differently the market prices the safest and riskiest borrowers. Bonds are priced over Treasuries; private loans are priced over a floating base rate, so the BDC composite bar, when it lands, is a spread over base and is labeled as such.

Yield stack

The base rate of every floating loan against the yield on the liquid alternative, ten years monthly, with the composite lines to follow.

How to read this

A private loan pays the base rate plus a spread, so its yield moves with SOFR first and with credit risk second. The high-yield effective yield is what a public bond investor earns for a comparable borrower; the gap between the two lines is the room a private lender has to price a spread. Each line starts where FRED's history starts, and the caption says where that is. The composite yield of the listed BDCs is added when their schedules of investments are parsed.

The credit committee's note

Written by the research model from the figures drawn on this view — the eight conditions, the spread ladder and the newest stress, capital and deal-flow readings — and only those figures.

How to read this

The note is argument, not data: the tiles and charts above state what the series say, and the note reads them together in the voice of a credit committee memo. It is written on request, from a list of facts the page computes at render time, and it may not use a number the page did not post. Every figure it cites can be found in a tile or caption above. A deployment without the note feed says so here instead of writing.

Press “Write the note” to have the research model read the figures on this view.