BDC mark

A BDC mark is the fair value a business development company assigns to each position in its loan portfolio. Because BDCs hold private-credit loans that don't trade on an exchange, there's no observable market price — the manager must estimate fair value every quarter using a combination of recent trade comparables, model-based discounted cash flow, and judgment about credit quality. The reported mark is typically expressed as a fraction of par cost: a mark of 0.98 means the position is valued at 98% of its original cost.

Marks matter because they directly drive a BDC's reported net asset value (NAV) and its book of fair-value gains and losses. A 1% downward revision in marks across a $20B BDC portfolio is $200M flowing out of NAV — material to shareholders. Marks also drive non-accrual decisions (when a loan's mark falls below a threshold, BDCs typically place it on non-accrual), distribution coverage, and ultimately the manager's incentive fee.

A key analytical signal is mark divergence — when two BDCs (or a BDC and an interval fund) hold the same credit at the same period-end but mark it differently. Some divergence is expected because the holdings may be different tranches or have different cost bases. But when divergence exceeds the typical bid-ask spread for comparable liquid debt, that's a flag. Either one manager is being aggressive, one is being conservative, or the position has structural differences worth investigating.

SpreadVista tracks every mark across 74 BDCs and 32+ credit-focused funds, surfaces the divergences automatically, and links each mark back to the underlying SEC 10-Q/10-K filing for verification. Built for the credit analysts who need to validate marks against peers without manually rebuilding the comparison from PDF filings.