We typically dedicate the new year’s first issue to reviewing the year gone by. Unfortunately when we emerged from the holidays, 2020 seemed lost in a fog of masks, sanitizers, and Netflix bingeing.

Two items in December did manage to penetrate our consciousness. First was an opinion piece from our content partner, Creditflux. Fellow columnist and top credit manager, Tom Majewski, wrote: “[2020] will represent the Credit Suisse loan index’s 27th year of positive total returns in its 29 years of publication.”

An impressive statistic, we thought. Hard to imagine any asset class matching that consistent performance over time, particularly through a pandemic year.

The other item was a superb credit webinar, courtesy Lincoln International’s Valuations and Opinion Group. Topics included COVID’s impact on terms, structures, and valuations. Their data, gleaned from over 1600 portfolio companies spread among over 100 investment fund clients, are a strong proxy for private credit behavior: