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 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 its filers tag across 88 BDCs and 55 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.