Private credit has grown from roughly $250 billion after the global financial crisis to an estimated $2.6 trillion, according to research from the CFA Institute Private Credit: Market Structure, Fund Design, and Retail Access2. This growth has increasingly come through funds sold to individual investors.
The main investment channel is the business development company (BDC), a US fund that must report every loan it holds, and its value, in quarterly US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.Â
Listed BDCs trade on an exchange; non-traded BDCs are bought and redeemed at net asset value (NAV) set from the manager’s own loan values.
Retail access is not the problem, missing prices are. For the fastest-growing part of the market, the loan-level filings are the only public view of how a portfolio is built.
Among the 72 BDCs which consistently submit filings on the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system, non-traded net assets grew from $32 billion in early 2023 to $116 billion by the end of2025, and listed ones from $42 billion to $55 billion (Figure 1).
This means there is limited data on the majority of the funds holding the loans.
Market prices provide transparency. When investors doubt a listed BDC’s loan values or sector bets, its shares fall below NAV for all to see. A non-traded BDC’s NAV follows a valuation policy under board oversight but is never tested by trading.Â
