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Interval fund

An interval fund is a closed-end fund that offers periodic repurchases instead of daily redemptions. Plain-English explanation of how credit interval funds work and how their holdings are disclosed.

An interval fund is a closed-end fund that doesn't trade on an exchange and doesn't offer daily redemptions. Instead, it repurchases shares at set intervals — typically 5% to 25% of shares per quarter — at NAV. That structure lets the fund hold genuinely illiquid assets, such as middle-market direct loans, without the daily-liquidity mismatch that constrains open-end mutual funds. Over the last decade, interval funds became one of the fastest-growing wrappers for private credit, with major managers running multi-billion-dollar vehicles.

For credit investors, interval funds and BDCs are two doors into the same asset class, with different trade-offs. BDCs are exchange-listed, so investors get daily liquidity but also price volatility and premium/discount risk. Interval funds transact at NAV, eliminating discount risk, but investors can only exit through the periodic repurchase window — and when redemption requests exceed the window's size, they get prorated. During credit stress, oversubscribed repurchase windows (gating) are the structure's known failure mode.

Interval funds disclose holdings through monthly N-PORT filings — structured XML with value and principal for every position. That disclosure is actually richer in frequency than BDC quarterly Schedules of Investments, but it isn't analyst-ready: no marks, entity names that vary by filing, and no cross-referencing against other vehicles holding the same credit.

SpreadVista ingests N-PORT holdings for 55+ credit-focused interval funds and CEFs, computes implied marks so fund holdings compare directly to BDC marks, and resolves entities across both wrappers — the cross-vehicle view that treats the private-credit market as one asset class rather than two disclosure regimes.

Related terms

  • Implied markAn implied mark is fair value divided by par for a fund holding, computed when the fund doesn't report a mark directly.
  • Cross-vehicle exposureCross-vehicle exposure measures how many BDCs and funds hold the same underlying credit.
  • NAV per shareNAV per share is a BDC or fund's net asset value divided by outstanding shares.

See interval fund in real BDC portfolios

SpreadVista tracks interval fund across 86 BDCs and 55+ credit funds, refreshed when new filings land (BDC daily, fund N-PORT monthly), entity-resolved across the unified cross-vehicle dataset. Coverage from 2022-08-01 for BDCs; 2018+ for funds.

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