Editorial
Editorial standards.
You can read a private credit manager's audited accounts and still not know the margin on a single loan it made. That gap — rigorous at the top, silent at the deal — shapes what this site states as fact, what it only attributes, and what it declines to publish at all.
What counts as a source here
Credit splits in two. At firm level the record is unusually good: several of the largest managers are listed in London or Paris and file audited accounts, and several more run US vehicles that report quarterly, so assets, fee income and portfolio quality can be taken from a document rather than a press release. At deal level there is nothing — margins, covenant packages and recoveries are private, and most loans carry no public rating at all. A figure sourced from a filing is stated. A figure that exists only in paywalled trade press is attributed to it.
How a firm guide gets built
Every guide starts as a research file, not a draft: the strategies the firm genuinely runs rather than the ones its website lists, what its filings disclose that its marketing does not, where a junior actually sits inside the credit process, and every place those three disagree. Nothing reaches the prose that is not already in that file with a source and a date beside it. The discipline matters more in credit than most places, because a manager can describe itself as a direct lender while two thirds of its book is something else entirely.
What the checking pass looks for
Someone who did not write the piece opens every citation again and tries to break it: has the page changed since it was read, is the as-of date on the sentence, and is the claim wider than the document actually supports. Pricing gets the hardest look. Spreads, leverage multiples and covenant headroom move every quarter, and a candidate quoting last year's margin in a room is immediately placed as someone who read rather than watched the market.
Corrections
A wrong number is corrected in the article the day it is found, with a dated note at the foot of the piece saying what changed. Some errors do not deserve a footnote: a fund attributed to the wrong manager, a brand that no longer exists, a spread quoted from a vintage that has passed. Those carry the note at the top, where somebody walking into an interview will actually see it. Send one to info@privatedebtinterview.com with the URL and the sentence.
The sources behind a firm guide
Ranked by how hard they are to argue with. Anything from the lower half can shade a paragraph; on its own it cannot carry a number into a guide.
- Audited annual reports and interim results from the managers that are publicly listed
- Quarterly filings from listed lending vehicles, which disclose portfolio, yield and non-accruals loan by loan
- Firm-published pages: strategy, team and careers pages, with the date they were read
- Law-firm market studies on covenant and documentation terms, which are the only systematic public record of what deals actually contain
- Public pension and insurer disclosures that name their private credit commitments
- Named institutional reporting: Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, Debtwire
- Rating agency methodologies and sector commentary, cited with an access date
- What candidates say on career forums about a process they sat, marked as exactly that, and never the sole support for a number
AI disclosure
Language models are part of how these guides get written. They take a finished research file and turn it into readable prose, and they are good at noticing when section four of a long guide contradicts section eleven. Nothing they produce is published as it arrives.
The reason for the suspicion is specific to credit. Ask a model about a mid-market lender and it will cheerfully merge two managers with similar names, attach a fund to the wrong vintage, or quote a margin that was accurate in a different rate environment. All three arrive in the same confident register as a fact. So model output is read harder than a filing is, not more easily, and the editor owns every number that survives.
Where the boundary sits
Used for
- Turning a file that is already sourced into readable prose
- Drafting quiz questions for an editor to keep or throw out
- Flagging where one section of a guide contradicts another
- Reworking a paragraph that is accurate and badly written
Never used for
- Recalling a fund size, a close date or a spread from memory
- Vouching that a document says what the draft says it says
- Judging whether a claim is solid enough to publish
- Anything that reaches a reader with no editor in between
Who stands behind this
Editorial direction sits with Clara Lindqvist — the pen name this publication writes under. Nothing on this site is commercial: no lender, placement agent, search firm or course provider named in these guides pays for the coverage, and none of them reads an article before it goes up. Where a reader is pointed at an outside tool, Finance Interview Prep included, it happens inside a sentence because it is useful there, and no money changes hands for it.
Questions about these standards or corrections: info@privatedebtinterview.com