Independence
Our credibility rests on the filings, not on us.
Two questions decide whether a measurement like this is worth anything: who pays for it, and whether the matching behind it can be challenged. This page answers both, and gives you the accession numbers to check the second one yourself.
Who commissions the work
The independence question is not who we are. It is who pays us — and what they are allowed to change.
The quarterly corroboration file is commissioned by the auditor or the fund’s board — the parties testing the marks. Never by the fund being tested.
A manager who wants the same evidence for its own committee can take a seat on the platform and pull it directly. What we will not do is sell a manager a report about itself: the day such a report is unflattering, it does not go in the file — it gets buried, and the next one gets written to be buyable. That is the incentive that discredited issuer-paid ratings, and it is far more acute at five clients than at five thousand.
- Your fund is in the index either way
Being a client does not add you, remove you, or change how you are measured. Non-clients appear on exactly the same terms.
- No figure moves at a client’s request
An error is corrected for everyone the day it is shown to us, and the correction is dated. Nothing is delayed, softened or withheld.
- A report says what the filings say
If the marks sit above the co-lenders, the report says so. That is the only reason it is worth putting in a file.
- We are paid for the work, never for the conclusion
No engagement is priced on, contingent on, or renewed on what the numbers turn out to show.
A loan we refused to count
Anyone can write that their matching is careful. Here is a case where two positions looked identical and we rejected the pair — with the filings, so you can judge the call rather than trust the rule.
RYAN LLC
Same borrower. Same spread, to the basis point: +350 bps. Same seniority: first lien. Two unrelated managers. On the matching key alone, this is one loan held by two lenders — and their prices would have been compared.
- Maturity declared
- 2029-01-28
- Accession
- 0001193125-26-124286
The two maturities are 46 months apart. Two lenders holding the same instrument do not disagree by four years on when it comes due — so these are different tranches, and the pair was broken.
Maturity cannot be part of the matching key — only a minority of vehicles tag it, and the largest non-traded funds never do. It is used as a rejection test instead: where both sides declare it and they differ, the pair breaks.
This errs one way on purpose. A false negative costs one observation. A false positive publishes a fabricated gap against a named borrower.
- Comparable positions
- 314,960
- Dropped before publication
- 5,412
- Maturity conflicts between managers
- 34
RYAN LLC is one of them. The others are not hidden — they are simply absent from every figure we publish.
Verify any figure yourself
Nothing here is modelled, smoothed or estimated, and none of it is licensed from a dealer. Every price is read from a Schedule of Investments and carries the accession number it came from.
Take the case on the home page. AmeriLife Holdings LLC — a $1.41bn loan held by 17 funds across 6 managers. The 1178 basis points between the highest and lowest value is not our estimate: it is the difference between two numbers those funds filed themselves. Here are the first of them.
17 filings in total · the rest are in the subscription
How we know the gap is real
The fair objection to everything above: maybe the disagreement we measure is our matching going wrong. It is testable — and the test was already in the panel.
The same lenders hold two kinds of loan. Some are widely syndicated and quoted by brokers, so every holder reads the same screen. Others are bilateral, with no secondary market, so each lender values them on its own assumptions. We match both the same way — same rule, same code, same filings. If our matching were the problem, both would look alike.
Priced off a screen
27bps
observable inputs — level 2 · 766 loans
Priced by model
105bps
unobservable inputs — level 3 · 1,192 loans
Where the price is observable, lenders land 27 basis points apart — rounding and a day’s timing. Where it comes from a model, they land 105 apart: 3.8× wider, on loans matched by the identical rule. The gap is a property of the credit, not of our method.
| Lenders on the loan | Priced off a screen | Priced by model | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 25 (348) | 84 (450) | 3.3× |
| 4 | 35 (174) | 109 (254) | 3.1× |
| 5 | 25 (100) | 106 (188) | 4.3× |
| 6 | 33 (70) | 149 (106) | 4.6× |
| 7 | 34 (16) | 114 (45) | 3.4× |
| 8 | 24 (28) | 130 (58) | 5.4× |
| 9 | 32 (17) | 150 (36) | 4.7× |
| 10 | 29 (8) | 291 (12) | 10× |
compared at equal lender counts, because a max-minus-min gap widens with the number of reporters · the level is declared by the filer in its own N-PORT, not assigned by us · 393 loans whose holders disagree on the level are excluded · a structural split points the same way — loans carrying a CUSIP sit 31 bps apart, those without 104, 3.3× — though it tracks the fair-value level rather than confirming it from outside
What we do not claim
For an entity with no track record, one caught overstatement costs more than a dozen honest limitations. So here are the limitations.
Our methodology has not been reviewed by an outside firm, and we will not imply otherwise. The day it is, we will say so and name them.
A fund’s schedule must tie to its balance sheet within 0.5% before its loan-level detail is published. That gate covers $350.3bn of the $531.9bn we track. The rest is measured but not published at loan level.
A wide gap does not indicate which lender is wrong. Marks can differ on stale dates, recovery assumptions, or genuine information. We publish the difference; the interpretation is yours.
Everything on this page is built from 145 filings as of 2026-03-31. If a number cannot be traced back to one of them, it is a bug and we will treat it as one — publicly, and dated.
Ask us anything about the method
Reply within one business day.