Our quarterly investor letter is designed to keep you informed with regular updates on the MA Financial Global Credit Solutions (GCS) fund suite, along with insights into key themes shaping the private credit landscape.
Investor letters
Private credit has been everywhere in the first quarter of 2026, but what do we actually mean by “private credit”?
We challenge the increasingly narrow use of the term. While synonymous globally with sponsor-backed direct lending, private credit is far broader, spanning any lending outside bank balance sheets and public bond markets across a wide spectrum of strategies.
At MA Financial, our definition is simple: a defensive, fixed income replacement that generates a premium income return while preserving capital, pursued across the breadth of private lending, not a single corner of it.
Reflecting on concerns that some credit investors (public and private) appear to be accepting inadequate compensation relative to the inherent risks in their loan portfolios, we offer an adaptation of Warren Buffett’s two rules of investing specifically for private credit:
Rule #1: Don’t lose money. Rule #2: Don’t accept inadequate compensation for risk simply because the first rule is likely to be satisfied.
In private credit, capital preservation – the return of your money – matters most, however the return on your money needs to be attractive for the risks taken. This is why manager transparency and disclosure are essential, enabling investors to understand what really sits under the hood of their portfolio.
At MA Financial, we believe private credit investing is all about ‘avoiding losers, not picking winners’. In our Q3 investor letter, we explain why our approach focuses not on replicating the best loans ever made, but on understanding which loans to avoid. By studying the factors that have historically led to credit impairments, we identify the red and amber flags associated with losing money in credit. Each major credit event offers valuable lessons, and we use those lessons to continually refine our investment process because “the greatest teacher, failure is."
Alongside our Q2 performance summary, we explain why, at MA Financial, we don’t spend time trying to predict the future when managing our GCS funds. Instead, we embrace uncertainty as a constant and invest and manage our portfolios to deliver on our objectives across a broad range of market conditions.
Alongside our Q1 performance summary, we explain why at MA Financial we believe in building the ark, not predicting rain: rather than trying to forecast an uncertain future, we focus on constructing resilient portfolios designed to deliver strong returns across a range of market conditions.
