The herd panics. The smart money moves. Few understand this.
Look. I’m going to explain something about the private credit buying opportunity that just opened up, and most of you aren’t going to act on it, because most of you are conditioned to follow the herd. That’s fine. More for me.
A financial analyst named Bill Blain—runs a morning newsletter for institutional types—published a piece this week about the Blue Owl situation and the broader private credit market. Now, Blain’s a smart guy. He’s been in markets for decades. He sees the right data. But he makes the same mistake every legacy finance person makes: he sees risk where there’s opportunity.
Here’s what actually happened. Blue Owl restricted redemptions on one of their retail credit funds. Their stock dropped over 50% in a year. And then—this is the part that matters—they sold $1.4 billion in loans at 99.7 cents on the dollar. Ninety-nine point seven. To pension funds. The biggest, most conservative institutional buyers on earth looked at those loans and said: yes please.
But the stock still dropped. The headlines still screamed. Retail investors still panicked.
You see what I see? That’s a spread. That’s dislocation. That’s where wealth gets built.
What The Legacy Guys Get Wrong
Blain compares Blue Owl to Bear Stearns gating their structured credit funds in 2007. He raises the alarm about $39 trillion in US debt. He mentions the tariff ruling chaos and asks whether this administration could manage a financial crisis. He’s asking all the right questions.
But here’s what he doesn’t see: the Supreme Court just nuked the tariff program. That means less economic disruption going forward, not more. The market hasn’t priced that in yet because everyone’s too busy panicking about the panic. It’s circular. It’s emotional. It’s exactly the environment where disciplined investors—people with the mindset, not just the money—step in.
And yes, Boaz Weinstein’s SABA fund is circling Blue Owl’s BDCs with a tender offer at a 20-35% discount to NAV. Blain calls them “sharks.” I call them smart. They’re buying assets the herd is dumping because the herd reads headlines and the smart money reads balance sheets.
I would be doing exactly the same thing if I had that kind of liquidity right now. I don’t, currently, because my capital is deployed across several pre-revenue positions. But the instinct is correct.
The Real Lesson Here
Blain warns that private credit “should never have been a retail product.” With respect, that’s exactly what legacy finance always says when retail gets access to anything that used to be reserved for institutions. They said it about individual stock trading. They said it about crypto. They said it about my $FREEDM position, which—yes, that particular project didn’t work out, but the thesis was sound.
The thesis is always sound. Asymmetric access to institutional-grade assets is how wealth gets redistributed upward, and now that retail is finally at the table, the establishment is panicking harder than the retail investors.
He just draws the wrong conclusion. Where he sees systemic risk, I see systemic repricing. Where he sees Bear Stearns, I see the bottom. Where he sees sharks, I see the market working exactly the way it’s supposed to.
The people who bought Bear Stearns’ assets at a discount in 2008? They made a fortune. The people who sold? They’re the cautionary tale in Blain’s newsletter.
Not financial advice. But if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
Stay liquid. Stay sharp. Stay dangerous.
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