Know Thyself: What Apollo Is Fixing That Others Haven't... Yet

Mark Goldberg
2 days ago
6 min read

I visited the Temple of Apollo on Ortigia yesterday on a family vacation. Apollo's oracle at Delphi is where the god's most famous instruction to mortals came from: know thyself. An honest accounting of what you are, taken before you act, is the discipline the maxim demands.

August 19, 2026

Mark M. Goldberg, Alternative Investments Market Intelligence, 19 August 2026, “Know Thyself: What Apollo Is Fixing That Others Haven't... Yet”, https://www.altsmi.com/post/know-thyself-what-apollo-is-fixing-that-others-haven-t-yet

A few months ago, I said Private Credit Managers lost the narrative. I heard those words later repeated in an interview with John Zito. Now, Apollo is reclaiming the narrative.

In a recent OpEd I highlighted Robert Shiller's point about contagious narratives, and how it applies directly here: narratives don't just describe markets, they make them. That is why I said private credit lost the narrative. The current reaction by most managers to media coverage and redemption pressure is to say all is fine. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. However, the information underlying private-credit marks is weak enough that nobody outside the manager can tell whether a mark reflects real deterioration or stale process. NAV is not proven. It is determined. When a number is determined rather than proven, investors and advisors have no independent way to trust it. So the narrative takes over: software, PIK, cockroaches. All are fodder for suspicion.

That's when the loop starts: narrative shifts, advisors grow cautious, flows slow, redemptions rise, marks come under pressure, windows tighten, coverage turns more negative, and advisor caution deepens further. That loop runs on distrust. It doesn't require any real deterioration in credit quality, only investors who lose confidence in the number in front of them.

Apollo is the first manager to respond to that dynamic with real judgment, and we all should pay attention.

A Mark Used to Just Be a Mark

A little bit of context is in order. In a traditional closed-end fund, the quarterly mark was reporting. Investors committed capital. The manager invested it. The portfolio got valued periodically. Eventually assets were realized, capital came back, and carry was paid on realized economics after investors got their capital and preferred return. The GP's economics didn't hinge on quarterly changes in NAV, and investor returns weren't predicated on controlling the timing of their own exit. Nobody transacted against the interim mark. An investor wasn't entering at that number. Another wasn't redeeming at it. The semi-liquid structure is a completely different setup.

Now NAV is a transaction price. Investors enter at NAV. Investors exit at NAV. Performance fees run off NAV. Incentive economics can be calculated off NAV periodically. It has become an economic and transactional focal point, produced by a process designed for a different era and applied to a structure with entirely different incentives. To compound the challenge, public BDCs that trade on exchange, where price is determined by share transactions, were trading at steep discounts. If I can buy a traded BDC with a similar portfolio at a discount, why wouldn't I sell my non-traded BDC at fair value and gain the same exposure at a discount?

Supervised Self-Assessment

Here's the deeper issue: in most perpetual private vehicles, the investment manager retains overwhelming influence over the valuation process. Third-party valuation firms provide inputs. Independent boards provide oversight. In practice, the manager typically assembles the methodology, selects the comparables, and applies the adjustments. The relevant question has always been who bears final responsibility for the number. When a firm earning a management fee on NAV also controls what that NAV is, the process becomes a form of supervised self-assessment. Oversight exists. The economic incentives remain concentrated and conflicted anyway.

The process has largely been predicated on fair value: an accounting determination as to whether the loan is “money good,” not much more. That determination doesn't ask whether I could gain exposure to the same asset more cheaply elsewhere, whether I could sell the loan at the value assigned to it, or whether interest rates or spreads had moved. Fair value answers a narrower question than the one investors are asking.

So when managers responded that all is fine in private credit, the media got it wrong, or advisors were overreacting, they were met with overwhelming rejection in the form of redemptions and a slowdown in new investors. Every defensive answer to a valuation question tells investors and advisors the industry would rather explain the mark than improve it. They lost the narrative because they didn't acknowledge where the problem resides. Know thyself.

What Apollo Actually Changed

Apollo is changing how the marks get made.

Three things stand out:

More frequent pricing across the credit portfolio
Standardized, improved underlying credit data
A secondary market in private credit, which is the piece that matters most

Pricing frequency alone doesn't buy accuracy. Marking something every day instead of every quarter makes the number more frequent, not more correct. What improves a valuation is independent evidence: real transactions between parties who have no incentive to agree with the manager's model. That's the accountability investors need when determining to buy, hold, or sell a position. A functioning secondary market gives judgment something external to be checked against, rather than leaving the manager to grade its own homework with a board looking over its shoulder.

Apollo's argument isn't that this credit cycle is fake or that the concerns are overblown. It's that the disproportionate reaction to a real credit cycle traces back to weak information, and weak information is a fixable problem.

I've Watched This Play Out Before

In 2015, I supported FINRA's push to improve NAV reporting for non-traded REITs. Parts of the industry fought it hard, because better information about value was going to change how attractive some of these investments looked. It did. That resistance was the reason the change was necessary. Opacity was buying those sponsors a version of investor confidence that couldn't survive scrutiny, and once scrutiny arrived, the confidence didn't erode gradually. It was an avalanche. Most of the sponsors who fought that fight are gone or irrelevant now. The industry moved on without them. I am thankful for that evolution. Like a light switch turned on in a cockroach-infested apartment, they scatter and hide.

When investment managers hold onto past conventions, whatever the motive, I call this pattern the death grip of modern investing: holding onto practices that worked in a prior version of the product, past the point where the product has outgrown them. The incentive structure changed when these vehicles went perpetual and semi-liquid. The accountability framework largely didn't. That gap is the origin of the tension visible right now, and some managers death grip is mistaking an information problem of their own making for a public relations problem. Apollo is the first to attempt to fix it. I suspect it's because they have nothing to hide while others might. A conjecture on my part, but I have seen this movie many times in the last four decades and this rings true for me.

Why Isn't Everyone Doing This?

There are legitimate reasons more managers haven't followed Apollo's approach. Better data infrastructure costs money. Building secondary-market liquidity is hard. More frequent price discovery can introduce volatility into reported NAV that wasn't visible before.

None of that changes the underlying obligation. If NAV sets the price at which investors enter and exit, and determines what the manager earns, the burden falls on managers to justify why their valuation process hasn't evolved along with the product built on top of it.

Apollo has shown that evolution is possible. That makes “this is just how private markets work” a much harder argument for everyone else to make.

Leadership, Not Reflex

Every other manager facing the same questions has treated this as a communications problem: get ahead of the story, defend the practices, wait for sentiment to turn. Apollo treated it as a diagnosis and asked what was actually driving the disproportionate reaction. They decided to build the answer into its infrastructure. I applaud it.

Reflex defends what already exists. Leadership asks whether what exists is still adequate for the product it's attached to and acts before the market forces the question.

Apollo is the first manager to act like that obligation is attached to its role, the kind of honest accounting the god at Delphi demanded of mortals long before anyone was pricing a loan book. Who else is prepared to look that closely at themselves?

There's an irony in the name. The god of prophecy and truth demanded self-knowledge of mortals before they acted. The firm that shares his name is the first in this industry to demand it of itself. I love the irony and am reminded how travel sometimes gives birth to better perspectives.

Disclosure: The author may hold a position in securities of Apollo Global Management or related entities discussed in this note. This piece reflects the author's personal views and is not investment advice.

Mark Goldberg is the founder of Alternative Investments Market Intelligence (AltsMI.com). He has served as chief executive officer of investment management and broker-dealer firms and received the Institute for Portfolio Alternatives’ Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the wealth management industry. Through AltsMI.com, Mark publishes the Alts Leaders Survey and research on private-market adoption in the wealth channel. His commentary and published research are widely read, and he is a featured speaker at industry events.

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