Blue Owl Execs Bought Stock as Private-Credit Worries Hit Firm’s Funds

Marc Lipschultz, co-CEO of Blue Owl Capital, recently said its business-development companies were performing “extremely well.” (Jose A. Alvarado Jr/Bloomberg)

Key Points

• Blue Owl Capital executives and employees purchased $130 million in stock across two of its public business-development companies.
• Blue Owl Capital Corp. stock trades at a roughly 10% discount to its Sept. 30 net asset value of $14.89 per share.
• Blue Owl Technology Finance stock trades at about a 15% discount to its Sept. 30 net asset value of $17.27 per share.

As shares of business-development companies focused on private credit sold off in the past two months, executives at Blue Owl Capital Inc. pushed back, saying their BDCs were sound and didn’t deserve to trade at big discounts to their asset values.

The firm’s executives and employees backed up that view with open-market stock purchases totaling $130 million in two of the firm’s public business-development companies.

Executives and employees of Blue Owl Capital Inc. (ticker: OWL), the management company, bought $115 million of stock in Blue Owl Capital Corp. (OBDC), its flagship BDC with about $7.7 billion of net assets, from the start of November through Monday. The purchases were disclosed in a regulatory filin g late Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Business-development companies are tax-advantaged investment vehicles that pay out the bulk of their income to shareholders. Many of them have focused their investments on the private-credit market.

Executives and employers of the Blue Owl management company also purchased $15 million of common stock of Blue Owl Technology Finance (OTF), a private-credit BDC focused on loans to leveraged technology companies, according to a separate filing late Tuesday. Those purchases ran from the start of November through Tuesday.

“We are surprised by the trading levels,” Craig Packer, co-president of Blue Owl Capital, told Barron’s in October. “Both of our funds are performing very well from a credit and dividend perspective.” Barron’s wrote at the time that private-credit BDCs trading at big discounts, such as those from Blue Owl, were worth considering for investors.

Marc Lipschultz, the Blue Owl Capital co-CEO, recently told Barron’s the BDC portfolios were performing “extremely well.”

Julian Klymochko, the president of AccelerateFT, a Canadian financial services company, tweeted on X that the Blue Owl open-market purchases were a good example of “putting your money where your mouth is.”

Blue Owl Capital Corp. makes high-rate loans with yields of about 10%, mostly to highly leveraged companies controlled by private-equity firms. The shares took a hit in October and November amid investor concerns about private credit, but the stock has rallied lately as the worries have eased.

The stock, up 0.3% to $13.26 on Wednesday morning, bottomed at $11.65 on Nov. 19. The stock now trades at a roughly 10% discount to the fund’s Sept. 30 net asset value of $14.89 a share.

Blue Owl Technology Finance stock was up 1.5% to $14.48 on Wednesday, compared with a low of $12.89 in mid November. It now trades for a discount of about 15% to its Sept. 30 NAV of $17.27 a share.

Write to Andrew Bary at andrew.bary@barrons.com