Thank you, Katie. Good morning, and welcome to Blackstone Secured Lending Fund's fourth-quarter and full-year results conference call.

Joining me today are Brad Marshall, Co-Chief Executive Officer, and Teddy Desloge, Chief Financial Officer, along with other members of the management team available for Q&A, including Jon Bock, Co-Chief Executive Officer, and Carlos Whitaker, President. Earlier today, we issued a press release with a presentation of our results and filed our 10-K, both of which are available on the Shareholder Resources section of our website, www.bxsl.com.

We will be referring to that presentation throughout today's call. I'd like to remind you that this call may include forward-looking statements, which are uncertain and outside of the firm's control, and may differ materially from actual results.

We do not undertake any duty to update these statements. For some of the risks that could affect results, please see the Risk Factors section of our Form 10-K filed earlier today.

This audio cast is copyrighted material of Blackstone and may not be duplicated without consent. With that, I'll turn the call over to Brad Marshall.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Before highlighting the results from the quarter and some key observations, I would like to take a moment to share our macroeconomic views heading into 2026.

Stepping back to the broader macro environment, despite periods of volatility over the past year including tariff uncertainty, geopolitical instability, and elevated headline risk, we continue to see a fundamentally healthy economic backdrop. Overall, corporate earnings growth has remained resilient, the consumer continues to demonstrate strength, and fiscal and monetary conditions remain supportive.

Together, these factors are contributing to sustained economic momentum. Key driver of that momentum is the ongoing technology and AI-driven investment cycle, which I will provide more details on shortly.

We believe we are in the early stages of a significant capital expenditure build-out focused on AI, digital infrastructure, and related technologies, providing a durable support to growth across multiple sectors, particularly when you couple that with encouraging signs on inflation. We believe this macro and investment backdrop has translated into robust capital inflows into Blackstone's private credit strategies over 2025, and particularly strong demand from the institutional channel most recently.

We are coming off one of our most active quarters of investing for BXCI, and have over $40 billion of dry powder to invest in direct lending into a market that, in our view, remains highly receptive to direct private credit solutions. Looking ahead, we believe this combination of a constructive macro environment, improving credit fundamentals, and a defensive first-lien orientation positions the BXSL portfolio well from a performance and investing standpoint.

On earnings, BXSL reported another strong quarter with our net investment income, or NII, of 80 cents per share, representing an 11.8% annualized return on equity, made up overwhelmingly of interest income rather than income from PIK or dividends. Our distribution of 77 cents per share was 104% covered by our net investment income per share and represents an 11.4% annualized distribution yield on NAV.

BXSL delivered a 9.6% net return for the year, outperforming the leveraged loan market by 360 basis points, with an 11.2% annualized return since inception seven years ago. BXSL, at the outset, was designed to have a lower cost structure so that it could focus on what we believe is a higher-quality portfolio, and you are seeing that durability reflected in quarterly performance.

A few core topics I'll discuss from the quarter include a busy quarter of deployment, recent headlines around private credit and related concerns around software companies, and the impact that AI may have on them. On deployment, the fourth quarter was our second most active quarter of funding since 2021.

We increased our overall portfolio to 316 companies across 40 industries, funding 13 new credits which had an average LTV at underwrite of 41% and an average spread near 500 basis points, and completed 15 add-ons to incumbent names. Some of the larger fundings during the quarter were to AmTrust, an insurance managing general agent focused on specialty programs; MannKind, a public biopharma business; IEM, an electrical equipment manufacturer supplying data centers; and Saber Power, an engineering firm that is a provider of electrical infrastructure services.

BXCI led all four of these senior secured transactions and was the sole lender in three of them. Additionally, another large investment during the quarter, which BXCI co-led, was for a digital aviation solutions business called Jeppesen, sold by Boeing for $10.5 billion.

We believe this company has a dominant market position, is performing exceptionally well post-close, and is categorized by BXCI as being well-positioned from AI risk given its deep entrenchment in the aerospace industry and high cost of failure. These deals highlight how we are investing around some of our core themes at Blackstone, including life science and AI infrastructure.

Despite positive trends in deal activity as outlined during last quarter's call as well, external narratives around bubbles in the credit market continue to percolate in the news. What we are seeing on the ground and across the over 300 credits we are invested in in BXSL is broadly inconsistent with this.

In fact, if you look at the top 90% of our names in the portfolio, these companies are growing EBITDA at 9% over the past 12 months, and have interest coverage over 2 times, and have an average mark of 99. This is consistent with my comments earlier about a healthy economic backdrop and the benefits of lower interest expenses for our portfolio companies.

Meanwhile, there has been significant external focus on AI's impact on the overall economy, and on software companies specifically. It's helpful as a starting point to highlight that Blackstone has been at the forefront of AI and its impact for many years, with its deep technology vertical supporting and informing investment activity across the broader platform.

This is one of the big advantages of being part of the world's largest alternative asset manager, and has helped drive our focus on deeply embedded, high-retention businesses. Blackstone sees the AI revolution creating generational opportunities, and we want to stay ahead of this as leaders in the space.

We receive real-time insights through our firm-wide resources, and use that to make us better investors. Additionally, Blackstone is one of the largest investors in the entire AI ecosystem, including the infrastructure around it as the largest owner of data centers globally.

Leaders across the firm focused on AI are active dialogue with the AI market leaders such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others. These relationships help inform our perspective on where the industry is headed, and we believe that BXCI, with the help of the broader Blackstone platform, has an incredibly well-informed view on AI.

It's also important to understand that you cannot paint software with a broad brush. There are sub-verticals of software with proprietary systems, huge data lakes, and incumbent long-term customer relationships that may be more protected or see tailwinds from AI adoption, while other areas will be more at risk of displacement.

BXCI has typically avoided the less differentiated business models. Sub-verticals that we believe are likely to be protected are vertical software, ERP, data infrastructure, data management, and security.

These account for the majority of BXSL's software exposure, where we have seen 40% EBITDA growth since underwrite, and today these businesses generate over 2 times interest coverage. Importantly, the public market is differentiating in a similar way.

While software valuations have compressed from 18 times NTM EBITDA last September to 14 times today, these sub-verticals that I mentioned earlier continue to trade in the 15 to 20 times EBITDA range, implying well over 2 times enterprise value coverage of BXSL's first-lien exposure. We also put significant value on partnering with larger companies with sophisticated ownership and forward-leaning management teams to drive the adoption of AI technology.

As a reminder, 99% of our portfolio companies are private-equity owned or large public companies with market caps exceeding $5 billion. On Medallia, a name that we've discussed in previous quarters, we continue to mark the asset now at 77.75, which implies over a 70% reduction to its set-up enterprise value due to a slower-than-expected turnaround.

For background, BXCI led a first-lien term loan to 26% LTV at underwrite, supporting the $6.4 billion take-private acquisition of Medallia by the current sponsor, Thoma Bravo, who together with its co-investors have funded over $5 billion in cash equity for this deal today. The company has been underperforming not because of anything related to AI, but due to what we believe to be execution-driven issues, particularly in its go-to-market function.

Early last year, Thoma Bravo installed a new leadership team, and they are working through a turnaround plan. We also expect there to be discussions around the capital structure.

If I zoom in on the rest of the bottom 10% of performers in the portfolio, a common thread is operational challenges rather than any secular concerns. As such, these companies have been marked lower to an average mark of 82.

On average, these companies have been modestly down from an EBITDA growth perspective since underwrite, and were set up at underwrite with an average 42% LTV. The good news with these names is that over half of them have seen further equity and junior capital commitments by the sponsor or are experiencing improving performance overall.

In fact, we saw the watch list decline this quarter compared to last quarter as a result of some of these trends. However, to provide some illustrative framing, if you take this bottom 10% and just punitively assume the companies all defaulted, which again we do not—and I underscore do not—expect to see this happen, and BXSL recovers 65% over the next four years in line with long-term recovery of first-lien public loans, then based on where they are marked today, this would only impact the equity by approximately 100 basis points per year.

I state these numbers just to reinforce what I mentioned earlier: BXSL's model was designed to be defensive by focusing on first-lien, larger, private-equity-owned businesses across a portfolio with diversified industries. In reality, underperforming companies can recover.

Just this quarter, for example, SelectQuote, Colony, and Alliance Ground were three underperformers, and at their lows had a weighted average mark of 93. All have been paid or are expected to repay this quarter at par, generating nearly $100 million of liquidity.

Putting it all together, we are encouraged by deal activity from the quarter as it has improved portfolio turnover and funding efficiency, which in turn should support ongoing earnings, and we remain very comfortable with the overall portfolio mix and positioning. We've seen similar market dislocations before, including during COVID, and even following the post-tariff news this time last year.

In periods like this, our focus is on providing as much transparency and clear facts as possible to help investors look through the headlines and assess the facts on the ground. For context, this is my 21st year of Blackstone's credit business.

Across multiple cycles and periods of volatility, BXCI has invested over $155 billion in our North American direct lending strategy with an annualized loss rate of less than 10 basis points. This is a result of focusing on investing defensively, as I just mentioned, but equally important is leveraging the advantage of Blackstone's scale and expertise, all of which we believe will continue to support excellent long-term results for our investors.

With that, I'll turn it over to Teddy.

Thanks, Brad. I will cover BXSL's performance, portfolio fundamentals, and liability profile for the fourth quarter.

First, on performance. BXSL's net investment income for the quarter was $186 million, or 80 cents per share, representing 104% coverage to our dividend on a per-share basis.

Year over year, fourth-quarter total investment income was up over $5 million, or 1.5%, and interest income, excluding payment-in-kind fees and dividends, represented over 91% of our total investment income in the quarter. BXSL continued to out-earn its dividend in the fourth quarter with a predominantly first-lien portfolio and among the lowest operating and financing costs across our traded BDC peers compared to Q3 data.

We will continue to assess our dividend with our board, as we do every quarter, as lower base rates flow through our portfolio. As previewed on last quarter's call, we experienced increased repayment activity in the fourth quarter, and with accelerating M&A and deal activity, as Brad outlined earlier, we are expecting similar levels of turnover in the upcoming quarters.

Moving to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with over $14.2 billion of total portfolio investments at fair value, $8.1 billion of outstanding debt, and $6.2 billion of total net assets. Net asset value per share at quarter end was $26.92, down from $27.15 in the third quarter, which was primarily impacted by 27 cents of net unrealized losses in the portfolio, partially offset by 1 cent of net unrealized gains and 3 cents of excess net investment income generated to our dividend.

As Brad highlighted, we saw healthy fundamentals on average across our portfolio companies, demonstrated by high single-digit percentage EBITDA growth and stabilizing interest coverage ratios at 2 turns, as rate resets are improving cash flow profiles of our borrowers. Non-accruals in the fourth quarter were just 0.6% at cost and 0.5% at fair market value, up from 0.3% at cost and 0.2% at fair market value in the fourth quarter of last year, as two smaller positions were added this quarter.

Further, our Q4 amendment activity by issuer was down over 25% compared to the third quarter, with over 85% of amendments associated with add-ons, M&A, DDTL extensions, or immaterial technical matters. Only four issuers experienced material amendments, accounting for 0.8% of the portfolio by fair market value.

Turning to activity, BXSL funded $1 billion for the second consecutive quarter and committed over $900 million. Net funded investment activity was $400 million after $629 million of repayments and sales, up nearly 45% quarter over quarter.

This represented an annualized repayment rate of 15% of the portfolio at fair value, up from 13% for the prior quarter and 6% for the same quarter in the prior year. As we sit here today, we are tracking over $550 million of potential repayments for the first six months of the year, which could create additional balance sheet capacity if they materialize.

Importantly, BXSL's board of directors approved a discretionary share repurchase plan under which BXSL may repurchase up to $250 million in the aggregate of its outstanding common shares in the open market at below its net asset value per share. As we see repayment activity create additional capacity, we will continuously evaluate capital allocation decisions between new opportunities and buying back shares.

Our liability profile remains diverse across multiple financing markets, including $10.5 billion and $8.1 billion of committed and funded debt, respectively, as of the fourth quarter. This includes $2.4 billion committed to our corporate revolving credit facility, priced at SOFR plus 153 at its tightest levels, which we believe is the lowest-priced revolver across the traded peer set.

We also have $2.7 billion of committed to our asset-based facilities with multiple banks, which had a weighted average drawn spread of SOFR plus 187, down 23 basis points since Q4 2024, in addition to over $450 million of CLO debt outstanding priced at SOFR plus 154. Lastly, we have nearly $5 billion of unsecured bonds outstanding as of the fourth quarter, $2.8 billion of which are not swapped and have an average coupon of 2.88%.

This includes a $500 million five-year bond we issued in October, priced at 155 basis points above the benchmark Treasury rate, or 5.125% coupon, which was subsequently swapped at SOFR plus 166. In 2025, BXSL had the tightest public bond spread issuance amongst its traded BDC peers, and taking this all together, our all-in cost of debt for the fourth quarter was 4.93%, down from 5.24% in the fourth quarter of 2024.

Total liquidity at the end of the fourth quarter was $2.5 billion, including unrestricted cash and undrawn debt available to borrow, while ending leverage as of December 31st was 1.3 turns on a gross basis and 1 and 1/4 turns on a net basis, net of cash. Our balance sheet strength, portfolio composition, and long-term operating history all help support BXSL in achieving ratings among the top three when compared to our traded BDC peers, with a Baa2 and stable outlook by Moody's, BBB- and positive outlook by S&P, and BBB flat and stable outlook by Fitch.

With that, I'll ask the operator to open it up for questions. Thank you.

Hey, everyone. Good morning.

First question, big picture, we're looking at the potential scenario where the non-traded channel slows. I know you have your share of institutional capital, but that's perhaps less so than some of the other great houses of direct lending.

How do we think about the impact where, for example, you've often talked about the importance of check size, larger companies, and so forth? Should we see it as a risk that you might have to go back down-market on new origination in the event there are non-traded headwinds?

Thanks.

Thanks, Fin. Thanks for the question.

Maybe just as a starting point, just to frame the market, the US leverage finance market is about a $5 trillion market. You look at high yield, it's about a trillion and a half.

You look at leveraged loans, about a trillion four. Private credit in the institutional non-BDC channel is actually about a trillion and a half.

The non-traded BDCs is about $275 billion, and the traded BDCs is about $235 billion. It remains very much, as you point out, an institutional-driven market, and why?

Because institutions see the asset class, I think similar to how you view it, which is it's very defensive. We're driving a premium to what you can get in the public markets, and that's really important.

If you look at our business more broadly to answer your question, our credit business is $520 billion. We are in every crevice of the credit markets.

We're invested in, I think you've heard us mention this before, 5,000 companies around the world, which gives us incredible insights into what's going on in the world and helps back up some of our investment themes. Our business is broad and deep in every channel.

If I look at corporate lending, specifically non-investment grade, we have about $40 billion of dry powder. I expect us to remain fairly active in the remainder of 2026, similar to how active we were in the fourth quarter of 2025, which was our busiest investment quarter since 2021.

Our business will remain active. We have lots of pools of capital to draw from, and it really comes back down to performance, and I think that will continue to attract capital in the space to the managers that are performing well.

Appreciate that. A follow-up on another sort of hypothetical, but also front-and-center question.

You're a little below book, still better than most, but we might be here for a little while. In that case, does it make sense to sit on spillover, or should we expect you to revisit that in a potential special?

Thanks.

Great. Thanks, Fin.

I appreciate you actually pointing that out. We do have spillover income as a result of us out-earning our dividend over time, and we've taken those over-earnings and invested it back into new loans to drive income for our investors.

I think, maybe to answer the question a little bit differently, as we get new cash proceeds into BXSL, either because of income or repayments—we mentioned we have a series of repayments coming over the next two quarters—we have options. We can reinvest in new loans, we can buy back, as you point out, discounted shares, we can delever.

Those would be the core kind of options. You're right, we could pay a supplemental dividend, but as our dividend at 11.4% being the very high end of the market.

Our focus has been on these other kind of options at this point. Of course, appreciate you highlighting the fact that we are in this enviable position of having out-earned the dividend, and also appreciate the point that we're in unusual time where we're trading below book, we need to consider all these options.

At the end of the day, it's a discussion around how do we want to best use our cash on hand to deliver attractive options for our investors, and all options are on the table.

Okay. Thanks.

Hi, guys. Kind of related somewhat to Fin's question, when we look at the grand scheme of things, flows in the BDC perpetuals in my view or the private market, aren't that significant to affecting pricing and spreads, right?

To your point, it's $5 trillion market and all the BDCs together half a trillion. What do you think the potential is if flows do deteriorate across the whole market for retail fundraising?

What do you think the potential is that's actually going to have a discernible impact on spreads in the market? CLO formation still looks pretty healthy.

A lot of the other areas of the markets still look pretty healthy. The retail flows seem to be quite a small part of that.

Is there any reason why that would actually influence pricing out in the marketplace?

I think it's a little early to tell, Robert. It's a good question, and appreciate you highlighting the liquid markets because they remain actually quite strong.

I think 66% of the liquid market is trading 99 or above. Spreads remain fairly tight in the liquid markets.

The credit markets generally, again despite what we read in the headlines, are actually pretty healthy. There's capital available, and as I mentioned, if you just look at our platform with $40 billion of dry powder, we will remain active in this market, and the overall credit quality of the deals that we're seeing, the credit quality of the deals that we're in, are not suggesting that spreads should widen at this point.

We'll continue to watch the market evolve, but right now things feel pretty stable.

Got it. Thank you.

If I can kind of pivot to software, and I appreciate all the detail you gave and the framework to think about it. On that, if I was going to say three years from now, do you think the software mix in your portfolio would be higher or lower than it currently is, or stable?

There is more potentially uncertainty. Obviously the different business models, etc., but are you looking to maybe not participate in the next time something gets refinanced, or would you prefer to shrink that exposure, or keep it where it is?

Or grow it?

The three-year crystal ball I don't have, Robert, but what I would say is we are seeing very good investment opportunities in the infrastructure around AI. You saw that in the fourth quarter: we made an investment in IEM, we made an investment in Saber Power.

That is definitely on theme for us. The picks and shovels kind of around this AI build-out, which I mentioned in our prepared comments, you could see us continue to lean into those themes and those opportunities because we think they have very good tailwinds.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you, Robert.

Thanks. Good morning.

Maybe we could just talk a little bit about what the sponsor conversations have been like over the last few weeks. Clearly, the public markets are very trigger-happy.

What are the sponsors thinking given that this was supposed to be a big capital markets year in kind of reviving IPOs, etc.? Maybe just your thoughts on those conversations.

It's a little bit like last year when the tariff noise came out and there was a lot of volatility and uncertainty. Sponsors are watching the markets and trying to see where they settle out before they bring assets to market.

I think like us, they're not terribly disrupted, but they are holding back right now in bringing some of these assets to market. I do expect, for all the reasons we mentioned earlier, it will remain a fairly active year this year because you do see growth in the economy, you do have lower cost of capital, which is positive for M&A activity.

All those tailwinds still exist, and we just need to work through a period of heightened uncertainty and volatility largely around the software space.

Got it. That's helpful.

Thanks. Then as a follow-up, we've seen a couple BDCs make some asset sales recently.

One of them had already said they were going to do this last quarter, it wasn't necessarily a surprise. Do you have a view on that?

You're trading below book, but not dramatically below book. Is there any benefit to selling assets at fair value and putting that back into the stock?

What I would say to that is we are definitively long-term holders of assets, and we also have $2.5 billion of liquidity. Like we mentioned on the call, we have $550 million of near-term repayments.

I suspect there's another billion or two that will occur over the balance of the year. The fund itself naturally generates liquidity because of the term nature of the investments that we make, and with those proceeds we will look at all the options as I mentioned in answering Fin's question, which is we will look at buybacks, we have approval to do that, we will look at new loans that come through our system, we may look to delever.

All those options will be on the table. It's probably worth just hitting on this turnover and repayment dynamic, which actually can be quite positive for BDCs and BXSL in particular.

I mentioned three assets that will be repaid this quarter. Those assets which had been marked down to the 90s at their low and now they're getting refinanced at par.

That sort of activity, as we get those repayments, will be positive on those underperforming assets to pull NAV up, and it'll be positive to generate liquidity which we can use to do one of many things as I just highlighted. Lots of different options on the table for us.

Thanks, Brad.

Thanks. You've mentioned weighing the share repurchase obviously with the new authorization.

Can you just walk through the thought process, how you all evaluate that, and kind of how we should think about actually using that versus kind of having it there for kind of in case further declines?

Doug, this is Teddy. I'm happy to take that.

I think the short answer is we're going to watch it and be very opportunistic. We do have $250 million approved by the board.

We also have turnover increasing in the portfolio, as Brad mentioned. Historically, below a 10% discount to NAV can be quite accretive for buybacks.

We've done this previously post-IPO. We announced $250 million repurchase that got done in 2022, and then we announced another plan in 2023.

We'll be opportunistic with it. We'll watch it.

It'll be a capital allocation decision between, as Brad said, paying down debt, new deals, and share repurchases.

Great. Appreciate that, Teddy.

Thank you.

Hey, guys. Quick question on some of the unrealized depreciation during the quarter.

Maybe you might have touched on it a bit in the prepared remarks, but I guess kind of specific to this quarter, it looks like the depreciation was largely driven by maybe a handful of positions, call it 5 to 10 positions with maybe single-digit percentage point markdowns. I guess my first question is, is this kind of consistent with your read, or do you see it as more of a broad kind of driven by broad market movements?

Then, second question, assuming it is, in fact, driven by a few names here, can you walk through any potential common denominators? I know you mentioned operational challenges, but do you see these as kind of idiosyncratic?

Any, I guess, additional specificity here would be appreciated.

Absolutely. Thanks, Ethan.

I'll start with just the facts. You're right, NAV per share was $26.92.

That's versus $27.15 prior quarter, down 23 cents or less than 1%, about 85 basis points. When you dig into the 23 cents, we had 26 cents of unrealized losses, about a penny of gains, and 3 cents of excess earnings.

Within the unrealized losses, you're right, the marks were concentrated to a small handful of positions. Two accounted for about 50% of net unrealized gains and losses, and the top five accounted for over 60%.

Taking a step back, what we see on the ground is stability, earnings growth consistently high single digits, increasing interest coverage ratios and cash flow profiles. While you certainly can see some movement in marks tied to both performance and spreads over time, what we're seeing is around 85% of the portfolio seeing stable or improving trends based on fundamentals.

Maybe just to add to that, because I mentioned this in the remarks, the number of deals on our watch list actually declined during the quarter. If I look back over the past seven years since we started BXSL, we've actually had zero net realized losses for investors.

It does kind of get back to we do mark the portfolio quite actively, but it is really, really designed to be defensive. That's why we're first lien in the capital structure, why we're with large businesses, why they're largely sponsor-backed, why we've picked some low-default sectors.

I just want to highlight that and the journeys that sometimes assets take, like the three I mentioned that just got repaid at par, were all in the kind of low 90s at one point. Companies don't always go up to the right.

We work through them. I also mentioned this on the call: I've been doing this 21 years in our direct lending business, our realized loss rate is 10 basis points a year over that 21 years, and that's obviously through a lot of different economic cycles.

This is just ordinary kind of marking of assets, and we feel very, very good about the overall portfolio.

Great color. Thank you, guys.

Then one quick unrelated question. You mentioned—I just want to get these numbers right—you mentioned $550 million of repayments over the first six months kind of in the insight.

Then, Jon, I think you also mentioned an additional billion throughout the year. Can you just kind of flesh that out?

It's Brad, not Jon,

Ethan.

Ethan, this is Brad. We have clear line of sight to $550 million of repayments.

These are committed deals that have or will be refinanced. If you look at a typical repayment cycle, it's somewhere between 15% to 20% a year.

If you just use 20%, that's $2.8 billion of repayments this year, and that's where we give the range of an expectation that we'll have another billion or two behind that just given the laddered vintages of our portfolio.

Excellent. Thank you, guys.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions, and most have been asked and answered.

The outlook on leverage is very helpful. Look, you guys have announced a repurchase, we just discussed the possibility of $2 billion of repayments this year, leverage sounds like it's going to be flat.

You're going to be making some choices in terms of how to deploy capital. With where we sit today, is your best incremental investment deploying capital into new assets or is it buying back stock?

It helps us sort of understand how you guys are thinking about that repurchase program.

Thanks, Rick. It's Brad, and it's great to have you on the call.

I think we're in a little bit of new territory for us. We've been trading at a premium for so long that trading at a discount is more of a more recent issue.

I think Teddy framed it well. We have bought back shares in the past, quite a bit actually, we're not afraid to do so.

We do have a lot of things that we need to manage: leverage levels, and making sure that we can support our existing portfolio companies. I will say that given where the stock is trading, buying back shares is a very interesting price to do so, but there are a lot of different factors that it's not as simple as that.

We've done it in the past, we think it's attractive, and there's lots of factors we'll evaluate.

I appreciate that, and it's helpful. Again, realizing it is a complex decision.

Look, the other thing is, and it's interesting revisiting the space after all these years, look, you guys are trading at a discount to NAV, but you are trading at a relative premium to most of your peers. Historically, we have seen in those environments, particularly where peers are trading at substantial discounts, some opportunities for strategic decisions that are actually accretive despite trading at a discount to NAV.

Are there pools of assets out there right now that you find attractive, or do you feel like those opportunities are just taking on other people's problems?

If you're referencing buying secondary loans that other investors are looking to sell, we've looked at portfolios. We do think that investing in new loans is the best use of capital for BXSL.

The secondary credit sales remains to be a fairly active market, and we look at that across our broader platform, but for BXSL specifically, I think we want to continue making new primary loans where we've had the ability to do very deep underwritings. As these take months and months of detailed work.

When you're buying a secondary portfolio, it's a little bit more of a tabletop analysis. BXSL will focused on new loans.

Great. I appreciate the clarity of the answer.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you for joining us this morning. We appreciate your engagement and ongoing support of BXSL.

Don't hesitate to reach out with any follow-up questions, and we look forward to continuing our dialogue next quarter.