Welcome back! This morning’s newsletter kicks off with a credit secondary scoop from our own Isaac Taylor, who reports that Ares Management and Antares have joined forces on yet another private-credit continuation fund deal, less than a year after the two firms inked their first such private-credit continuation fund.

Meanwhile, Isaac also looks at some of the signs of accumulated stress in business development company portfolios, while our Wall Street Journal colleagues look at how certain private-credit funds may have more exposure to the software sector than they are letting on.

Finally, our own Chris Cumming delves into a recent decision by the FDIC to roll back rules aimed at limiting the way private-equity firms invest in troubled banks.

Read on for more…

Ares Management’s credit secondary strategy and private-credit firm Antares Capital have formed a more than $1.7 billion continuation fund to recapitalize a portfolio of private-credit assets originated and managed by Antares, Isaac Taylor reports for WSJ Pro. The new fund is the second continuation vehicle Ares has formed with Antares in the past 12 months and comes amid a surge in secondary activity for private-credit assets.

Warning signs continue to mount for business development companies, as years of accumulated stress begin to show up in their portfolios of loans to midmarket borrowers, WSJ Pro's Isaac Taylor writes. A new report from credit evaluator Fitch Ratings shows that while BDCs have seen rapid growth, areas of concern have also ticked higher, such as loans falling into the payment-in-kind category and widening performance gaps. The proportion of interest from nonaccrual loans in PIK status last year reached the highest level since at least 2011.

Many private-credit fund managers are playing down their exposure to software as fears spread about threats from artificial intelligence. A detailed analysis revealed four large funds marketed to individual investors by Apollo Global Management, Ares Management, Blackstone and Blue Owl Capital have more exposure to the software industry than their filings suggest, largely because of what the funds categorize as software in their portfolios, the Journal reports.

The Trump administration continued its efforts to loosen restrictions on private equity by eliminating a policy aimed at ensuring that buyout firms invest responsibly in troubled banks, Chris Cumming reports for WSJ Pro. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on March 19 rescinded an Obama-era policy intended to prevent private investors from profiting at the expense of the financial system when they invest in failed banks. It mandated that firms hold these banks for a minimum of three years, maintain higher-than-usual capital levels and support the banks with their other assets.

Polymarket, the prediction-wagering website whose many private-markets investors include Dubin & Co. and Valor Equity Partners, has received a final $600 million growth investment from New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange. ICE agreed to invest as much as $2 billion in October at a valuation of $8 billion for the company legally named Adventure One QSS and based in New York. ICE, which said it invested $1 billion in the company last year, has also agreed to buy $40 million in Polymarket securities from some other investors.

SoftBank Group will borrow $40 billion through a bridge facility agreement to fund its $30 billion commitment to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, increasing the Tokyo-based firm's debt load as it doubles down on its partnership with the U.S. artificial intelligence technology developer, Elias Schisgall reports for Dow Jones Newswires. SoftBank said it will repay the one-year, non-collateralized loan partly through the sale of existing assets. The agreement lists JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs, Mizuho Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking and MUFG Bank as lenders. News Corp, owner of the Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

Blackstone is backing payments systems company Advanced Digital Gaming Technology with a $250 million investment, joining Abu Dhabi-based Raya Holding and strategic partners NRT Technology and Sightline Payments in establishing the business in the United Arab Emirates. The company is initially focusing on gaming payments processing and compliance in the Mideast and Africa.

Buyout firm CVC Capital Partners has its eye on taking Italian drug maker Recordati private by acquiring the roughly 53% of shares it doesn't already own, the company confirmed in a statement late last week. The company said CVC suggested it would pay €52 a share including a dividend, suggesting an equity value of over €10 billion, or roughly $11.5 billion. The firm holds a controlling stake in the Milan-based company and it is worth $5.78 billion, Joe Stonor reported for Dow Jones Newswires, citing London Stock Exchange Group data. When CVC initially acquired the stake in June 2018, it was worth $3.53 billion.

A group of senior executives including Antonio Gracias, founder and chief executive of Valor Equity Partners and pro sports figures that include former quarterback Tom Brady and Chicago Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts joined Aon Consulting in a $200 million growth investment in specialty managed-care company eMed. The deal values the business at $2 billion. The company works with employers and recipients of diet medicines known as GLP-1s to ensure they stay on their weight-loss programs. Brady was named the company's chief wellness officer in January.

Advent International in Boston is backing infrastructure design and engineering company Atwell, which has about 2,000 professional employees. The Southfield, Mich.-based company focuses on power and energy as well as commercial and digital infrastructure, among other things.

Our add-on deal interactive tool allows you to sort and analyze volumes of add-on deal data compiled by WSJ Pro. View more.

European buyout firm EQT AB is selling a collection of 36 warehouse properties to Ares Management's real estate strategy, which will operate the locations through its Marq Logistics operating business. The warehouses are located in major and secondary urban markets including Atlanta, Dallas and Chicago as well as Columbus, Ohio and Phoenix. EQT had invested in the properties through its EQT Real Estate Industrial Core-Plus Fund II.

Manna Tree Partners, a Denver firm co-owned by Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein's daughter, Gabrielle Rubenstein, is raising a new flagship vehicle, Manna Tree Fund III, with an indicated target of $250 million, a securities filing shows. Formed in 2018 by the younger Rubenstein and Ross Iverson, who are both managing partners, the firm invests in the consumer health and wellness sectors and managed about $816 million at the end of last year, according to a separate regulatory filing.

GoldenTree Asset Management has wrapped up a $703 million collateralized loan obligation, its 37th CLO, bringing the total issued since 2017 under the strategy to nearly $21 billion. GoldenTree Loan Management US CLO 28 is mainly backed with senior secured loans to start with.

Dominique Peninon, a co-founder of Access Capital Partners in Paris, is selling his remaining interests in the firm to the alternatives arm of Spain's Bankinter Group as part of its acquisition of a stake held by financial services provider Alantra, according to an emailed news release. The bank and the firm plan to combine their private-assets management operations. The firm also moved co-founding partners Agnès Nahum and Philippe Poggioli to co-executive chairwoman and executive chairman, respectively, and promoted four other partners to managing partner positions.

Thoma Bravo Managing Partner Holden Spaht offered a glimpse into his thinking about investing in software, posting on his LinkedIn page a brief summation that rebuffs the "nearly dystopian" narrative that says artificial intelligence will destroy the industry. "Much of the public conversation about AI and software being at war with each other misses what’s happening inside some of the leading software firms," Spaht wrote. The rapid rise in interest rates, oversold applications and other imbalances led to a stock market overcorrection, "re-pricing on AI disruption fears that aren’t fully visible in actual software business performance," he said. Though some software companies remain vulnerable to AI disruption, others stand to gain from AI by incorporating it in their systems, Spaht said. "We don’t believe the public markets make this distinction clearly."

Chris Hohn of TCI Fund Management led the list of the top 25 hedge-fund managers ranked by earnings, pulling in $4.9 billion last year, according to Institutional Investor, which said Hohn's fund rose nearly 28% in 2025. He surpassed Steven Cohen of Point72 Asset Management, who earned $4 billion, and Israel (Izzy) Englander of Millennium Management at $3.5 billion.

For those with long memories, news that some private credit funds have capped withdrawals brings to mind the summer of 2007, when a European bank limited withdrawals from funds stuffed with securities linked to subprime mortgages. The global financial crisis had begun, Greg Ip writes for the Journal's Capital Account column. Like subprime, private credit in just a few decades went from niche to major asset class. And like subprime, private credit is opaque, mostly unregulated and connected to other parts of the financial system including banks. So do private credit’s troubles herald a systemic shock similar to what we saw two decades ago? With the caveat that crises are inherently unpredictable, probably not.

Investors have yanked over $11 billion out of the private-credit funds in the last two quarters, the Journal reports, citing figures from investment banking firm Robert A. Stanger. While inflows of new money, totaling $12.4 billion in the past five months through February, have helped offset the withdrawals, the rate of new investment is slowing. Those flows—in what are known as business-development companies —are at the heart of the current debate about the state of the private-credit industry.

Advent International is in talks to expand Australian share-registry provider Automic overseas, with the Boston-based private-equity firm weighing options including potential acquisitions, Stuart Condie reports for WSJ Pro. Advent acquired Automic and its cloud-based financial-services platform last year. At the time, it said it would focus on growth in Australia and New Zealand, but that international expansion was also on its agenda.

Brookfield Asset Management-controlled Oaktree Capital Management has agreed to meet all of the redemption requests for the first quarter from its Oaktree Strategic Credit Fund, Jack Pitcher reports for the Journal, citing regulatory filings. The fund itself will repurchase 6.8% of outstanding shares as of Dec. 31, while Brookfield will buy 1.7% from an investor, fulfilling all of the shareholder liquidity requests for the quarter. Oaktree’s move contrasts with a number of other credit interval fund managers who have enforced 5% limits on quarterly redemption requests in recent weeks, including Ares Management's Ares Strategic Income Fund.

Buyers including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System may have been trying to protect the value of their holdings in Blue Owl Capital Corp., a publicly traded business-development company, when they agreed to participate in a $1.4 billion asset sale last month, Jonathan Weil reports for the Journal's Heard on the Street column, citing people familiar with the matter. The sale was marked at nearly par value and provided cash for Blue Owl to pay shareholders at one of its struggling BDCs, while also signaling that the asset values across its fund complex were reliable. Calpers, the $592.66 billion pension system, already owned stakes in the same assets it was buying – with a rough overlap of 70%, but the people said the structure of Calpers's holdings made it possible for the investor to pick and choose among assets on offer while avoiding fees and keeping any profits.

Credit spreads are widening in the software industry, Goldman Sachs reports, citing fears about artificial intelligence disruption in the sector for the increased cost of borrowing. Spreads have opened up by more than 250 basis points this year, making the relative cost of debt much higher than for other issuers of high-yield, or speculative, bonds, the bank said in a research note. But some software companies are much less likely to be disrupted, according to Matt Cifuentes, a credit analyst in Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Some might benefit from incorporating AI tools, he added.

Josh Harris, the Apollo Global Management co-founder who later started 26North Partners, is taking advantage of market fears over the impact of artificial intelligence technology to buy assets at multiples of seven times earnings instead of 10 to 11 times a short while ago, Reshma Kapadia reports for sister publication Barron's. Speaking at a conference backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Harris also said private-credit investments can still return 10% by focusing on senior debt with covenants.

Send us your tips, suggestions and feedback. Write to:

Maria Armental; Ted Bunker; Chris Cumming; Luis Garcia; Laura Kreutzer; Isaac Taylor; Chitra Vemuri.