John Cole Scott says BDC 'software problems' aren't surfacing in the data

Business-development companies saw their share prices get hammered early this year as the market worried about an overexposure to parts of the software industry that could be negatively impacted by artificial intelligence. John Cole Scott, President of CEF Advisors, looked at BDC data before and since those problems and says it appears that fears of A.I. risk were exaggerated since "We're still not seeing software blowing up BDCs." Scott, who also serves as chairman of the Active Investment Company Alliance, thinks it may take another two quarters of data to confirm that trend, but he says that BDCs have not seen a dramatic rise in non-accruals or "exacerbated losses ... in a material way," with research showing the a lot of the most severe issues were isolated in "the bottom cohort" of BDCs, the outliers with the most exposure that made headlines amid the software downturn early this year.