Loan Marks: see how every BDC values the same private-credit loan

The core analysis is already done, and sold, by institutional vendors. Octus, SOLVE, 9fin, PitchBook LCD, Dakota and Preqin all match loans across BDC filings, and several explicitly publish cross-lender mark dispersion and sharp-markdown flags. So Mark Alerts and the CSV/API would compete head-on with well-funded data firms that already serve credit analysts, and a new entrant has little edge with buyers at funds. The opening is at the bottom of the market. I found no free or cheap, polished public page where anyone can look up a borrower and see every BDC's mark side by side. The incumbents sit behind enterprise paywalls, and the open-source projects are raw parsers or early prototypes. A consumer-grade, searchable Mark Spread site could win with journalists, newsletter writers and retail BDC holders. It would need permalinkable borrower pages and fast updates when 10-Qs land, and could charge low-priced alerts for prosumers. That audience has weak willingness to pay, though. The data is free from the SEC, and EdgarTools makes it easy to rebuild, so the defensible part is the quality of the entity matching and how quickly you publish, not access to the data. Realistically this works as a media or lead-generation product, or a niche prosumer subscription, not a venture-scale data business.

• Octus (formerly Reorg) BDC coverage

  Octus publishes quarterly fair value change analysis that reconciles marks across 174 funds for the same borrowers. It flags borrowers where a manager cut the mark by more than 15% in a quarter, and its downloadable lists show each lender's mark as a percentage of par. It has also reported spreads of up to about 40 points between the lowest and highest marks on the same name. This covers the Mark Spread and Mark Alerts ideas for institutional subscribers.

• SOLVE BDC Data and Analytics

  SOLVE is a paid workstation covering about 162 BDCs with standardized loan-level look-through. Its co-investor search explicitly advertises comparing valuations across peer BDCs and challenging reported marks against loan comps. It also publishes quarterly mark-up and mark-down research.

• 9fin BDC Watchlist and BDC Holdings Data

  9fin launched the watchlist in July 2026. It covers 157 BDCs using AI-parsed filings and tracks fair value erosion and non-accruals. A separate product consolidates quarterly portfolios from more than 150 BDCs. Both are paid institutional products.

• Dakota BDC Holdings

  Dakota's paid database aggregates loans across more than 40 public BDCs and shows which BDCs hold a given loan and how much. That loan matching is the core building block of this idea.

• PitchBook LCD

  LCD data was the source for PIMCO's April 2026 finding that marks on the same loan differ by more than 5 points between the most and least conservative managers. This shows PitchBook already computes cross-BDC mark dispersion for clients.

• Preqin BDC holdings

  Preqin includes loan-level BDC holdings inside its paid private credit platform. Its only free offering is a downloadable report.

• anand-ujjwal/test-bdc (GitHub)

  This open-source tool parses SEC Schedules of Investments across large BDCs, with portfolio overlap matrices and cross-manager valuation divergence. It is the closest free equivalent to the Mark Spread page, though it looks early-stage.

• EdgarTools BDC module and SEC BDC Data Sets

  EdgarTools is a free Python library with a schedule-of-investments parser, built on the SEC's free bulk BDC XBRL datasets. It makes the raw data cheap for anyone to rebuild, though it doesn't match borrowers across BDCs.

• tpmkuehn/bdc-soi and spergel/bdc_extractor_standalone (GitHub)

  These are open-source extractors that pull holdings from BDC 10-Q filings into CSVs. Neither appears to compare marks across funds.

Checked 2026-10-25