PRIV and Beyond: March 12th Update
Whoa boy. Lots to do. PRAB, CityWide and other stuff.
Hi folks!
Welcome to the March 12th update of PRIV and Beyond.
It’s been a wild week. I spent Sunday through Wednesday in the sun in Miami for FutureProof Citywide. I was helping the ETF.com staff and appeared on a panel with Sumit and Dave Nadig that was a really fun chat about private market ETFs.
I’ll admit I was probably more supportive of private credit (as a whole) than most people would have expected but looking at the narratives being built in real-time around “The End of Private Credit” it seems like this story sells a lot of ads but doesn’t have a huge default rate (yet). The problem lies with the use of “private credit” to cover a monumental and disparate group of assets.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/apollo-plans-to-value-private-credit-daily-in-answer-to-critics
Apollo made some headlines by taking the high road in disclosures for their private assets. We’ve seen this with them logging TRACE reports for a number of the private assets in PRIV/PRSD.
This is GREAT.
Anyone who has read this little newsletter for long enough knows I hate the information gap in private credit. It creates a world of have’s and have-not’s. By offering daily NAV and hopefully real third-party valuation modeling, this will bring more light to the murky darkness of private assets. I always want more disclosure so I think anyone who owns these ETFs should be getting monthly reports, just like an LP would, on the underlying loans in the portfolio.
A boy can dream.
I went to FutureProof CityWide. I have seen the future. The future is trust, or rather, the lack of trust.
I was fortunate enough to get to wander around during the conference and meet a TON of folks I had only read/seen prior. I got to meet Michael W. Green, Ben Hunt, Sam Ro, CFA, Bob Pisani, Sumit, and a ton of other amazing writers and commentators. It was incredibly humbling to have people tell me that they actually read what I do and I’m not just some idiot barking in the wind like a seal (at least not all the time).
Mike and Ben chatted with Dave about trust in society and the evolution of how narratives and stories are tracked and sculpted. It’s incredibly scary but also incredibly hopeful. Both of them are much smarter than me but I was honored to get a few minutes to pick their brains (particularly Mike about CDX/PCR because of my history with credit derivative products).
I also saw a lot of… slop. There were a bunch of AI/tech companies there mostly selling the exact same “solutions” that can pretty readily be built internally. Some crypto folks were there but with the year they’ve had I’m guessing marketing budgets got slashed. This is NOT true for the crypto indexers who were (rightfully) out in force. I got to chat with some Bitwise folks and they’re pushing the envelope as fast as they can.
I know, I know. You want me to talk about PRAB.
Well here it is.
The State Street® IG Public & Private ABS ETF (PRAB) launched on Wednesday with little fanfare and $25mm AUM, which seems to be the usual style for SSIM these days for anything related to private credit.
Go take a look at the assets. I’ll give you a moment.
It’s uhhh… pretty boring.
There are no Apollo sourced direct private loan assets. The ABF assets are almost entirely not novel to PRAB nor even PRSD. You can find this stuff in JSI, BRTR, and plenty of others.
Pros:
This is 100% exposure to this slice of credit (asset-backed finance) assets. There’s no treasuries, there’s no fluffy IG crap, there’s no Fannie/Freddie positions. You’re getting a full portfolio of public/private ABS.
The fee is reasonable! 39 bps for this is a GREAT price. It splits the difference between the private credit CLO products (PCLO at 29 bps and PCMM at 68 bps) and errs on the side of cheaper.
It has a wide swatch of credit profiles. It’s heavily stacked towards AAA (61.66%) but has 11% unrated and a solid chunk (17%) of sub-AAA exposure. There’s also still a big chunk of cash (9%) sitting in there which I expect will get partially deployed to get that down to 4-5% or less.
Cons:
They aren’t reinventing the wheel much here. The vast majority of the assets can be found in other ETFs and everything can be found in ETF/mutual funds.
I think this should have been the first product they launched, not the third. It’s a better intro to private credit but now that they have PRIV/PRSD with completely different investment theses, who are they going to push into this. I hope they advertise it as they could easily crush Virtus and BondBloxx who are adjacent to it.
The ticker is bad. PRAB sounds like a knock off fake krab stick.
Overall:
I like it.
It’s investor positive, these assets can be found and identified much more readily than PRIV or PRSD’s. The 100% asset class makes it much more interesting as an addition to a portfolio. You can allocated 2,3, or 5% to this and not get it diluted because of the illiquidity barriers.
I know this Substack was based on my annoyance at the shoehorning of private credit into retail products but this approach is the best of them. Decently diversified ABS tranches are much more solid and they depend far less on BDCs and CLOs that originate their own loans and only in the middle market.
Kudos to State Street even though they’ll never read it.
I’m glad I didn’t run into them in Miami!
Final Thoughts:
There is a LOT happening behind the scenes here at Outer Beach. Some of which I can’t talk about yet.
I would expect my weekly reports to continue for now but I will likely be eschewing the additional asset coverage for the time being.
I also will NOT be covering PRAB in any depth besides reporting flows and volumes as the assets are easily found with Google and some moxie.
I want to thank you, reader, for helping me build up what is a pretty cool little thing. Tune in Monday for the next PRIV and Beyond update!
Unless otherwise noted all data comes from my app and the database it pulls from uses the public holdings files from State Street and Invesco (linked below) to generate insights and track product changes..
Volume data is public.
Available FINRA data for assets:
More of my latest work:
Your Private Credit ETF Crash Course - ETF.com
Private Credit ETFs 101: Business Development Companies - ETF.com
Private Credit ETFs 101: Collateralized Loan Obligation - ETF.com
Have a great week!
Leave a comment/note/send me a message about my app/data and let me know what I can do better or just get rid of! No wrong answers.
Go read these people:
Dave Nadig : Nadig.com / ETF.com
Tony Dong : Linkedin / ETFCentral.com
Nicholas Phillips : Linkedin / ETFCentral.com
Jeff Ptak : Substack | Morningstar
Tematica Signals : Substack
Phil Bak : Substack
CovenantLite : Substack
Brent Sullivan : Substack
Leyla Kunimoto : Substack
The Kotok Report : Substack
also anyone I subscribe to on Substack. I actually do read them!
Thanks for reading.
I run an ETF consultancy and educate clients on potential market entry, product design, and content/marketing.
If you want to chat, please reach out to cmacwilliams@outerbeachc.com, connect with me on LinkedIn, or visit my website.
Disclosure: I own one share of PRIV, two shares of PRSD, two shares of PRAB, one share of XOVR, and one share of RONB. None of this is investment advice and is presented solely for educational purposes.