Investing Billions - E329: How Oaktree Is Positioning $223 Billion for a Credit Cycle Shift

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

What if the best way to navigate credit markets is not about chasing yield but controlling risk? In this episode, I sit down with Danielle Poli, Co-Portfolio Manager of Global Credit at Oaktree, to explore how she manages a $20 billion portfolio within a $223 billion firm. Danielle shares how focusing on core income, rigorous underwriting, and a flexible toolkit allows her team to navigate complex markets while remaining defensive or opportunistic as conditions change.

Danielle, your co-portfolio manager of Global Credit at Oak Tree, which has $223 billion. Tell me about Global Credit. What is the strategy? Global Credit is really meant to provide our clients one-stop access to Oak Tree's credit platform, focus on income, total return, in a diversified portfolio of our highest conviction opportunities. So Oak Tree was founded in 1995, and the founding strategies that the firm were high yield and distressed. And over the years, we did stepouts in areas like private credit, leverage loans, CLOs. And so we have a lot of different strategies. And what we found is that our clients on average are invested maybe in four strategies.

Some wanted us to be more strategic and think about allocating among those strategies, as we saw shifting relative value. And so since the firm's founding, we've been doing this kind of on a one-off basis, more fund of funds. But it was really in 2017 with Bruce Karsh's guidance that I and others with him created global credit as a single fund opportunity to participate in multiple credit strategies and benefit from our views on relative value. And you have the fun job of basically figuring out what's the best relative investment. So you get to go across multiple asset classes. How do you figure out which

part of credit or fixed income is most opportune? It's a really fun job working with so many people at Oak Tree. It takes a village and we're really relying on our portfolio manager's expertise across these different strategies to help us focus on those high conviction ideas. We get to on Tuesday mornings, 8 a.m. And we go around the table and we ask everyone, what would you do with the dollar on the table? What would you buy? What does that look like? Walk us through that investment. Conversely, is there anything you would sell from your portfolio to fund that? And when you start hearing from everyone, you get a really good sense of where relative value is at any point in time. And that's how we decide as a committee, maybe if we want to be more in bonds or loans,

or if we want to increase like the structured part of our portfolio. It's less about the macro and more about individual investments and themes that play through our portfolio. So at the end of the day, having diversification across all of these strategies, I think, is a benefit in itself. And our focus is subinvestment grade. So we should be able to largely kind of outperform investment grade markets. But the power of being able to allocate to different areas, depending on what's happening in the environment, I think creates consistency of return and better outcomes over time for investors. Your position is more defensive today than it was before. What's the strategy if somebody wanted to be more defensive in the credit market?

One of the ways is just having a lot of tools in your toolkit. So our global credit strategy at Oak Tree was really designed to provide our clients one-stop access to all that we do in credit and an all-weatherer portfolio. So when we construct a portfolio of our liquid credit strategies, we kind of think about core and alpha. And the core, we've got high-yel bonds and senior loans. and then the alpha, we've got some strategies that have the potential to provide attractive yields, but they require more expertise. That's structured credit, CLOs, real estate debt, merging markets, convertibles. So when we're thinking about being more conservative, sometimes it's focusing on the core,

on safe income streams and kind of doing what we do best, underwriting credit, where we're going to get paid back the income. So we have more in the core to death. What metrics are you looking to determine how aggressive you want to be in the market? the health of underlying borrowers. We've been in an interesting environment. We saw interest rates spike 500 basis points that has increased the debt burden for a lot of borrowers. And so we are looking at leverage levels, how their free cash flow generation is going. Are they spending that on capbacks? How much of that is going to paying back interest? We're looking at that. We're also looking at some of the behavior in the market when it comes to lending. Right now, there, in my opinion, is too much capital chasing two field deals. There's a huge need for capital, just given how much debt needs to be refinanced over a trillion in the high yield and senior loan markets by 28, huge capital expenditures for data centers, AI, et cetera. So there's a lot of need for capital and a lot of managers have raised big funds to deploy. And there hasn't been the issuance in the M&A

that we've inspected. And so that has created, I think, some exuberance in lending. So you're seeing lower lending standards, less covenants. And that's the type of behavior that also gets us a little bit worried. One of the hardest things of investing is seeing what's shifting before everyone else does. For decades, only the largest hedge funds could afford extensive channel research programs to spot inflection points before earnings and to stay ahead of consensus. Meanwhile, smaller funds have been forced to cobble together ad hoc channel intelligence or rely on stale reports from cell-side shops. But channel checks are no longer a luxury. They're becoming table stakes for the industry. The challenges has always been scale, speed, and consistency. That's where AlphaSense comes

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Almost overnight, companies trade down 40-50% with agentic AI disrupting certain industries or somebody vibe coding a competitor to a $10 billion company over the weekend. How do you factor in AI into your underwriting? And what are the downstream consequences of AI as a credit investor? AI is evolving. It's still unknown. We're seeing rapid advancements.

It's one of the reasons why we've approached the space very conservatively. We've had an underweight, strategic underweight to the technology sector and in particular software. I've worried about these types of risks, which are unknowns. And so we are coming into it with a lower allocation, looking to maybe find potential opportunities as some of the sell-off may be overdone. When you are underwriting for AI risk, there are certain things that you can focus on that may be more resilient within kind of the software sector. So things like security of record or in a potential future environment where we have AI agents running around doing things for us, requiring our social security number and driver's license. You're going to need security with that data. And so there could be winners in that sector.

So it's just one more thing that we have to underwrite for. We're really focused on underwriting individual companies more than a sector, but you have to be mindful of what's going on in a sector and how that could impact your thesis on an individual name. The devils in the details. Software companies might become riskier, but security companies in theory could actually become less risky if there's more demand for them.

That's right. We love an unloved sector, right? That's where some of the best opportunities often are. They call it, you know, baby out with the bathwater. And I think we're probably seeing that right now with the broad sell-off. in the software space, there's probably some good companies that are going to be able to repay their debt because a lot of these advancements won't materially impact their businesses within kind of the window of the debt maturing. This seems to be a longer-term problem for companies.

But that said, when you have such a broad opportunity set like we do, we don't need to go chasing those types of deals. We can find really attractive things to do in other sectors and other parts of our portfolio. Double click on that. You see a sector that's been hurt. That's weaker than it was the previous year. And you want to find the core companies that are still good to lend to. What's the framework around that? How do you go about finding, I guess, the baby in the bathwater? It's interesting. Maybe chemicals right now is a good example.

It's a sector that got beat up really badly in high yield, and you're kind of seeing it roar back. Because oftentimes, as Howard Mark always says, there's a pendulum of risk, right? Things swing one direction and then they swing back. And so we want to catch things on the swing back and be more conservative kind of in those more challenged environments. It's all about the security.

Security analysis, fundamental research. We've got over 160 credit research analysts at Oak Tree that are focused in individual asset class and then individual sectors. So they know their sectors. They cover all of the credits. They're really in the weeds to be able to spot those types of opportunities. Tell me about the K-shaped economy. What does that mean? K-shaped, I think, is a good kind of illustration, right? You think about the K, and you think about what's happened in the economy, especially since COVID, with top income earners continuing to see their percentage of wealth increase. and you've seen lower income consumers fall into more challenge times. I mean, dare I say that some are already in a recession in this market, they have not kept up with wage growth, largely are not participating in the same way in the equity market as higher income consumers. Higher income consumers are really driving this economy forward right now.

But that creates challenges, not only wealth inequality, social unrest and other things, but it makes the economy more fragile. If equity markets falter, and I think we can all agree, valuations are pretty high, they're pretty stretched, if you see a hiccup in that market, all of a sudden, this group that's so heavily invested in equities is less likely to be spending as much keeping the economy going. It means that we could have dislocations more quickly. And so as an investor, it just makes us think we need to be more conservative in this type of a market, given those types of risks. And we need to be mindful of spending patterns between those two groups and how that could continue to play out.

So I want to move forward to best practices, whether your endowment, pension fund, single family office, what should a credit portfolio look like that's complementing their equity portfolio? What are some best practices? It gets to what you're trying to achieve. When we launched the global credit strategy in 2017, rates were very low. And so a lot of our institutional clients were looking for a return that was better than cash, preserving some liquidity in terms of funding other kind of closed-ended private. opportunities. And so we were able to build a business around an active liquid fixed income allocation that included kind of higher alpha opportunities like structured credit, real estate, emerging markets that would create some additional yield. Constructing that core alpha, I think was a best practice for us and knowing when to lean into the core, when to lean into the alpha. And that was a time to lean into the alpha to kind of outperform what you could do in more traditional markets. As kind of the cycle shifted, flash forward to 2019, when we felt

markets were pretty fully priced, we became more conservative in our posturing. And then that allowed us in 2020 to go much more on the offense as the market was selling off, reallocate to sectors like convertibles that were impacted by equities, CLOs that saw spreads widen into a thousand. That's Oak Tree's DNA being one of the largest distressed managers, is kind of knowing when the cycle changes, knowing when to go on the offense. And so I think having diversification across a number of strategies, key best practice, but two, is that toolkit being able to flexibly reallocate when it makes sense in the market. It's that Warren Buffett, quote, be fearful when others are greedy and greedy are when others are fearful. That's the way to basically operationalize that.

That's exactly right. I mean, we've deployed the most capital and had the best results for our clients when there's periods of dislocation, whether it's COVID or if it's the announcement of tariffs, Liberation Day. Those pockets provide an opportunity for us to outperform our stated yield. Perhaps this is a dumb question, but how should investors think about private credit versus fixed income? It seems on the outside, similar, but they're obviously very different. They play a different role in the portfolio. Talk to me about each role of those two aspects. It's timely because we're seeing a lot of convergence in the industry between public and private.

Just this last year, there was roughly an equal amount of capital that refinanced from public to private and private to public. So now you have companies that are tapping into both markets, which is somewhat of a new trend over the last few years. But when I think about constructing a portfolio with publics and privates, I think about it twofold. I think you should be paid to give up liquidity. Support for today's episode comes from Square, the all-in-one way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, man and staff, and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, running boutique, or managing a service business, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground.

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Get started with Experian app today. Results will vary. Not all bills or subscriptions are eligible. Savings not guaranteed. Paid memberships with a connected payment account required. See Experian.com for details. And so private credit should offer you excess yield, excess spread. And by and large, it does today, though some parts of the market, those spreads are thinner.

So if we look at traditional sponsor-back direct lending, you're still getting a small premium, but maybe not as much as you once were because of the convergence. And so we're doing less in that space today because we can find attractive, comparable yields within the public markets where we can get really, I think, interesting opportunities for income that are higher than both of those markets is in parts of the private market like asset-backed finance in particular, where you have diversified income streams, cash flowing, you can tap into other sectors maybe that we wouldn't include in the portfolio and get maybe, you know, 200 to 600 basis points of excess spread return. So in an environment like this, if we're going to add

privates to a portfolio of publics, they need to be giving us good compensation for the underlying risk and give up of liquidity. So that's kind of where incremental dollars are flowing. Now, when markets become more challenged, right, and you have a freeze up of lending, banks get hung with things on their balance sheet and kind of the syndicated markets close, that's when you want to go in as a direct lender and do small substands or back to financings and other things and really serve as a provider of capital where you can command not only better terms, but you can get protection in the form of covenants. So another way you want to be liquid when everybody's liquid and you could give up that liquidity when people need liquid and you get a pretty high multiple, pretty high

premium. I want to talk about the DNA of the firm. I mentioned it was starting in 1995, Howard marks and co-founders, what did they instill in the DNA that made it grow to 220 plus billion today? Howard penned an investment philosophy when the firm was founded in 95 that's still unchanged and in use today by all of these strategies. It's a unifying investment philosophy. And we really kind of live and breathe it. Risk control is the number one tenant. And that's our focus on avoiding defaults. It is supported by all of our credit research and our focus on bottom up credit research, which should then lead to consistency, the second tenant. Howard has a saying, you know, at Oak Tree, that if you invest with us, it's kind of like his favorite restaurant. Like, we're

always good. We're sometimes great, but we're never terrible. And that's been really important to the DNA is focusing on avoiding loss, downside protection. That should lead to consistent results over time. And then the other tenants really speak to not being a macro forecaster, not timing markets, knowing that macro forecasting is very hard to do with any level of consistency, and that if we really focus on the underlying companies and their fundamentals, that should lead to more consistent performance. So that's been really key, a key teaching, and he always reminds us about that investment philosophy, as well as how to think about where we are in the market cycle in terms

of our risk posturing. That's really the DNA of the firm. And you run a $20 billion portfolio within the $220 billion firm, AUM. Is it not difficult to invest $20 billion? And how do you find opportunities with such a large amount of capital? We've grown over time as the markets have grown. So I think the size today is perfectly suitable for this environment. And I see the potential to manage even more capital.

We launched the strategy in 2017 with a paper portfolio and then eventually a $100 million seed from Oak Tree. And then over time, the capital has followed. So it's been Oak Tree's fastest-scoring strategy, as you mentioned, up to $20 billion in assets since the time we launched. But importantly, the growth has been staged. It's been steady. One of the things I'm most proud of is that we've never had a quarter of net outflows in the strategy, even in more challenging periods like COVID. You know, given our focus at the firm on distressed, it tends to be in those types of environments where actually investors are looking to increase their exposure to oak tree. So it's allowed us

to have capital at the right times when there's, you know, good opportunities to deploy. So being measured, I think, has helped that. And then, again, you know, having a lot of different strategies in areas at the firm, there's so many different areas that we can invest in. A lot of multi-strategy funds are more focused in high yield and loans. We do so much more outside of that, tapping into structured credit, real estate, convertibles. Give me a sense of the market. So you're 20 billion investing in how big of a pool of capital or opportunity set is there? We've calculated anywhere between, you know, $8 to $13 trillion addressable market, just given the size. And that continues to grow.

But look, we are mindful that you shouldn't be deploying into markets such that you're moving the market, right? We always try and be reasonable with our portfolio managers. I think there's a great opportunity in European senior loans because of the yield advantage. But our portfolio manager there says, yes, but if you deploy this much capital immediately, I'm not going to be able to transact at those levels. That's an important dialogue to have. And so we're not trying to force things. We feel like our size is appropriate for this type of market and that we have.

ample kind of growth ahead. Speaking to the CIO of Mubadala capital, and they actually use their capital as a strength. They found out that if you have a couple billion dollars to invest in deal, there's actually a few competitors there. Is there a place where the amount of capital you're managing can be used as an offensive weapon could lead you to less competitive situations? Yes. I'm so glad you brought this up because a lot of the conversation is around capacity.

You're too big to access these niche opportunities. But in these niche markets, being a player of size, being able to speak for an entire deal and being one that's well known and established with a trading desk that speaks on behalf of all of Oak Tree is a huge advantage. So I do think it allows us to see the best opportunities to take more than our fair share of deal allocation as well. Is there such a thing as first call alpha in credit where you're one of the first people that somebody calls?

Likely. But if you're the first call, that means you really need to be the one that's leading the diligence efforts, and there's no substitute for doing your homework in credit. It's a really rigorous bottom-up approach that our credit analysts used at Oak Tree. There's something called the credit scoring matrix that's been around at Oak Tree since our founding, where each analyst needs to underwrite an individual borrower's creditworthiness using eight different success factors. And nowhere on that page is the terms of the deal in terms of yield or spread or price. It's all about, is this company going to repay us? What do the covenants look like? What's our downside? Are we

secured, et cetera. And oftentimes we will pass because the credit gets a negative score and we'll call up the bank and we'll tell them we're passing for these reasons. And sometimes you may hear back, oh, well, what if we increase the sweetness of the deal? What if the yields higher? Well, that's just going to increase the interest rate burden for that company and make it more risky in our view. So, like, actually sticking to that is how you avoid defaults consistently over time. I'm very proud of the performance of the strategy, but the avoidance of default allows us to deliver that type of performance. I'm an equities guy. I'm a venture guy. So I get to always ask, what if this goes right? What if this goes 100x, 1,000 X? You're a credit person. I've gotten to know you.

You're such a lovely person. Do you ever get tired of looking at everything through the credit lens and always looking to the downside? This is my biggest conundrum in life, right? So we know each other now. And I think I'm a serial optimist in life, but it works. You have to be a serial pessimist. You have to look at the downside and what can go wrong. Building the business, working with our clients, that's where I've been able to really express that optimism and the growth in the markets and the power of credit for our clients and their beneficiaries. But when it comes to the day to day, it's all about risk control and managing to the downside. So we share that entrepreneurial spirit in building something and spotting opportunities, listening to trends. That's been really the privilege of working at Oak Tree

getting to have a startup within the firm, with the firm's founders. When I imagine a credit firm, I think of a lot of very pessimistic people sitting around the table. Is it more like a team construction where different people are looking at from different lens and you have different personalities, not everyone just thinking about the downside, or is it just an asset class where everybody just needs to focus on the downside? Diversity of thought is really important,

and that's why we have those committees, where we hear from everyone in their perspectives. Alignment of interests through incentives is also important. So one of the things that we do at Oak Tree is we have our form of deferred compensation. It invests alongside global credit for the majority of our employees. So all those portfolio managers are really incentivized to make the right decisions for the structure.

strategy. So they won't be, you know, paid more if they're managing more capital in a certain strategy. Everyone wants the fund to do well, and I think it allows us to come up with the best decisions. But I'll tell you, if someone has concern among a group that doesn't, we focus mostly on that concern because the downside is so much larger. Things are skewed to the downside. So having a voice that says, no, these are the reasons why I wouldn't do something is important. I'll give you an example. Emerging market debt are focuses on corporates. We tend to go into, areas maybe that are undergoing stress. The sovereign has a lower rating. The company, if it was based in the U.S., might be investment grade rated. So we had a very large emerging market debt exposure in

the portfolio in 2016, 2017, when we launched the strategy. It was our highest returning strategy that year up, maybe 20%. And our portfolio manager said, we've got to get out of this area. Spreads and the SEMB high yield index are now tighter than in the U.S. high yield index. This has only happened a few times. It doesn't end well. You should always be compensated going into emerging markets. That was our top performer in the strategy, and we had some really interesting opportunities with high yields that we didn't want to remove from the portfolio.

And he told us, let me walk you through those 20 credits or so that are out yielding the SEMB Index, and for all the reasons, why I wouldn't invest in that on a fundamental basis? And of course, we listened to him and his expertise and guidance, despite the rest of the committee thinking, wow, the growth trends are in the favor of EM. This is a big alpha driver. So we took a strategy down to zero.

And then in 2018, local currency markets got roiled. It spilled into corporates. We were able to buy back some of that exposure. So that's why listening to those that are focused on risk control that really know those markets and have concerns is key. Because it then leads maybe potentially to opportunities in the future more buying-like opportunities. That's kind of how the committee works. If you could go back to when you first started before you were managing $20 billion, what is one piece of advice you'd give a younger Danielle that would have either accelerated your career or helped you avoid cost of mistakes?

Great question. And I think I would say that the power of compounding is important in investing, but it's also very important in one's career, building trust, relationships, always doing the right thing, caring about people. Those are principles that Oak Tree was founded on. It's been a privilege to work with people that share those principles. But I think this is a people business. And you want to be focused on relationships and things that are going to compound over time,

not just the actual investments themselves, which compounding is. also very important. A lot of people also underestimate you start something in 1995 like oak tree, what 31 years of compounding looks like. It looks like $220 billion. You've said this before on my favorite podcast that you did where you were actually interviewed, that sometimes, you know, the best investment outcomes, they're doing the things that other people aren't. They're looking different. Maybe they're not looking right at the time. They're doing the unsexy. That's compounding, right, in credit and earning that income over time and building a business over time. I think that also can be applied to the people and the relationships. And it's a joy to work at Oak True.

We have a fantastic culture and fantastic people. Well, Danielle, thanks so much for jumping on. Thank you to Eye Connections for hosting and looking forward to doing this again. Thank you so much, David. It's one of pleasure. If you found this conversation valuable, please click Follow How I Invest so that you don't miss the next episode with the world's top investors.