Blue Owl Marks Loparex Debt Down to Pennies While Its Other Fund Raises $800 Million in New Notes

Blue Owl Capital manages roughly $315 billion in assets. One of its flagship vehicles just gave investors a case study in how fast a private loan mark can move.

At the end of 2025, Loparex, an adhesive-liner manufacturer, looked like an ordinary holding inside OBDC, the publicly traded business development company that anchors Blue Owl's credit platform, according to Briefs.co. Senior loans were carried at full value. The second-lien slice was marked just under 90 cents on the dollar.

By March 31, 2026, that second-lien position had fallen to roughly 63 cents. Today, OBDC values it near 5 cents. One first-lien piece that sat close to par at year-end is now carried at 22 cents, per Briefs.co.

OBDC moved Loparex to non-accrual status after the second quarter of 2026, meaning it no longer expects to collect full interest. This week, Moody's Ratings declared Loparex in default and flagged the possibility of a Chapter 11 filing. Loparex did not make its June interest payment on the second lien and is currently operating under a forbearance agreement that runs through September 2026. S&P Global Ratings had already said in 2024, after a distressed exchange it viewed as tantamount to default, that Loparex's capital structure was "unsustainable."

A Pattern, Not a One-Off

Loparex isn't an isolated stumble. Hedge fund Glendon Capital Management flagged what it called inconsistencies in Blue Owl's valuations earlier in 2026, according to Crypto Briefing. The complaint: OBDC was carrying about $235 million in junior preferred stock and second-lien debt at roughly 90 cents on the dollar at the end of 2025, while senior debt tied to the same borrowers traded around 78 cents in the market. Junior debt gets paid after senior debt in any default, so marking it higher than the safer senior claims requires an explanation Blue Owl hasn't fully given.

OBDC's net asset value per share fell 2.7% to $14.41 in the first quarter of 2026, which the firm attributed to spread widening and credit-specific factors. Its shares have traded at a 22-25% discount to reported NAV through most of 2026, even though the company reports a non-accrual rate around 1% of fair value.

The software sector, a Blue Owl specialty, has taken the brunt of it. As of mid-2026, 81% of software loans across BDC portfolios industry-wide had been marked down, according to Crypto Briefing. Blue Owl has trimmed its own software exposure within OBDC from 19% to 16% of the fund.

In February 2026, Blue Owl sold $1.4 billion in loans out of its BDC funds at an average of 99.7 cents on the dollar. That sale is the strongest evidence Blue Owl has that its marks aren't fantasy, at least for the assets it chose to sell.

The Other Fund Tells a Different Story

While OBDC was writing Loparex down to pennies, a related Blue Owl vehicle was out raising money on the strength of its numbers. Blue Owl Technology Finance Corp (NYSE: OTF), a separate BDC externally managed by an affiliate of Blue Owl Capital, closed a $150 million private placement of 7.60% senior unsecured notes due September 2032 on September 4, 2026, according to PR Newswire and Pulse 2. That was OTF's third financing since June 30, bringing its total debt raised in that stretch to $800 million.

CEO Craig W. Packer said OTF's portfolio "continues to perform well, with one of the lowest non-accrual rates in the BDC sector" and that the firm sees "an increasingly attractive environment for technology investing." OTF held investments in 205 portfolio companies worth $14.7 billion as of June 30, 2026, and ended the quarter with more than $2 billion in cash and available credit capacity. Every existing bank partner renewed its revolving credit commitment.

OTF and OBDC are not the same fund, and Blue Owl's defenders would fairly note that a default at one borrower inside one BDC does not indict every credit vehicle the firm runs. Non-accrual rates across both funds remain low, in the range of 0.8% to 1% of fair value, which means the overwhelming majority of Blue Owl's borrowers are still paying their bills on time.

Why the Marks Matter Anyway

The concern raised by Glendon Capital and echoed across the sector isn't that every loan is bad. It's that a $1.8 trillion private credit market, largely exempt from the kind of public pricing that stocks and bonds get every day, relies on managers to mark their own homework. When a loan can go from carried near par to 5 cents in two quarters, observers disagree on whether that signals a sudden unforeseeable collapse at Loparex specifically or evidence that the earlier marks were too generous for too long.

Lower share prices relative to NAV create their own pressure. When BDC shares trade 22-25% below reported net asset value, raising fresh equity gets harder, which limits a fund's ability to grow past its problem loans. Redemption pressure on non-traded private credit funds is already building industry-wide, according to Crypto Briefing, a dynamic that can force asset sales at exactly the wrong moment and turn a paper loss into a real one.

Loparex's forbearance period runs out this month. Whether it exits through a restructuring, a Chapter 11 filing, or a negotiated extension will be the next concrete test of whether OBDC's newest marks hold up or need to move again.