New York, Feb 20, 2026, 06:02 (ET) — Premarket
- Shares of Blue Owl Capital slipped just under 0.1% to $11.58 before the bell.
- Shares tumbled 5.9% Thursday, following the firm’s move to alter withdrawal terms for a small private debt fund.
- Traders are keeping an eye out for upticks in withdrawal requests, along with any ripple effects hitting private credit managers.
Blue Owl Capital Inc shares slid again Friday morning, building on the steep drop from the day before as investors reacted to revised liquidity terms in one of the firm’s private debt vehicles.
This episode is significant. Private credit has attracted more capital from individual investors lately, much of it funneled into funds offering periodic redemptions—a set schedule when investors can take their money out. If those rules change, it all comes down to this: who’s looking for cash now, and which holdings wind up on the block to meet those requests.
It’s also turned into something of a stand-in for valuation jitters. Unlike stocks, private loans don’t get daily pricing, so investors fixate on “marks”—those manager-supplied values—particularly when funds are forced to unload assets in the secondary market.
Shares of Blue Owl dropped as much as 10% on Thursday before settling 5.9% lower at the close. The move came after the company announced it would return capital from a debt fund that’s been around for nine years and, at the same time, scrapped quarterly redemptions for that fund for good. Truist Securities analyst Brian Finneran noted that investors saw the asset sale as evidence that withdrawal requests had picked up. Over at Oppenheimer, Mitchel Penn pointed out Blue Owl “created liquidity” by offloading assets at its own valuations, but added, “nobody is getting a break.” Reuters
The firm disclosed it unloaded $1.4 billion in direct lending assets across three funds, with plans to use the cash to return capital from Blue Owl Capital Corp II, its private debt vehicle that’s not traded publicly. Blue Owl noted the loans fetched prices close to par — essentially their face value — underscoring what it says are solid portfolio valuations. Blueowl
OBDC II, which manages roughly $1.6 billion in assets, previously offered investors quarterly liquidity. Now, Blue Owl says it intends to return 30% of the fund’s net asset value—NAV stands for assets minus liabilities—to every investor within 45 days. That’s a shift from the fund’s usual tender process, which had only permitted limited redemptions.
Blue Owl fired back Thursday evening after reports described the move as freezing investor cash. “We are not halting investor liquidity,” the firm insisted, saying the plan aims to deliver “six times as much capital” to shareholders within the next 45 days. Reuters
The fund stopped redemptions back in November. Later, the firm scrapped its plans to merge with a bigger listed fund, following investor pushback. That’s all per earlier disclosures, analysts noted.
Thursday’s bout of selling didn’t stop at one firm—names like Apollo and Ares, both heavyweights in private credit, saw shares slip too. Traders weighed whether the drop pointed to wider headaches around withdrawal demands.
One technical metric investors are watching: the secondary sale price. When managers manage to offload loans near their stated marks, that tends to quiet worries about forced markdowns. But if loans start selling off at a discount, the stock market often jumps to the conclusion that valuations will follow.
The risk hasn’t disappeared. Should redemptions start piling up, managers might be forced to offload higher-quality assets just to meet withdrawals. That could put both earnings and fee growth under pressure. It doesn’t take a wave of loan defaults for sentiment toward the sector to turn sharply negative.
