The Fund delivered +1.10% in October, 14.14% over 12 months and 14.72% annualised since inception, continuing to deliver over 10% net return above the RBA cash rate.
Fund Profile: How This Strategy Differs from the Manning Monthly Income Fund
We’ve had a few recent conversations that highlighted it may be useful to briefly restate what the Credit Opportunities Fund is – and isn’t – particularly in contrast to the Manning Monthly Income Fund (MMIF).
The Monthly Income Fund is built around predictable, scalable and repeatable financing arrangements. That naturally lends itself to larger transactions, highly diversified loan pools and a stable monthly cashflow profile. Its role is to deliver consistency and a very tight band of outcome variability.
By contrast, the Credit Opportunities Fund is deliberately positioned to sit further up the complexity spectrum. It targets transactions that are not suitable for MMIF due to a variety of factors, some of which include:
- Less scalable (finite size or one off opportunities)
- More idiosyncratic or heavily structured
- Not naturally monthly income paying (for example, quarterly or irregular payment profiles)
- Priced to reflect higher complexity and risk, consistent with the Fund’s higher return target.
As a result, this Fund is inherently more opportunistic. It is designed to participate in specialist, harder to access transactions where structure, control and pricing are attractive.
Market Conditions
We continue to see substantial capital flowing into credit – from bank balance sheets, offshore investors and an expanding universe of domestic credit funds. Many of these strategies fund a single originator or are themselves both originator and manager. At the same time, there is increasing scrutiny on asset valuations and how returns have been generated in some parts of the market. To borrow Warren Buffett’s line, "only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked". In that environment, we see clear value in:
- Having deep securitisation and structured finance experience across multiple cycles (over 150 years cumulative within the investment team); and
- Maintaining a mandate that can be genuinely opportunistic when others are forced to de-risk, sell assets or restructure funding arrangements.
The Credit Opportunities Fund is designed to take advantage of those moments - not by chasing distress for its own sake, but by selectively backing strong counterparties and asset pools where structure, control and pricing are compelling and where complexity creates a barrier to entry for more standardised strategies.
Pipeline and Capacity
Our current pipeline reflects this opportunity set. While still at an early stage and subject to full due diligence, we are engaged in discussions with several lenders and originators that, in aggregate, could represent in excess of $100 million of potential new facilities over the next 6–12 months. There is no guarantee these transactions will proceed or ultimately be suitable for the Fund, but they illustrate the breadth of opportunities we are seeing across the specialist and non-commoditised parts of the market.
If a subset of these opportunities progress on terms that meet our risk and structuring requirements, we can see a credible pathway to selectively reopening the Fund to additional capacity during 2026. Any such decision would be communicated well in advance and would continue to prioritise existing supporters of both this strategy and the Manning Monthly Income Fund.
For now, the Fund remains near fully invested with very low cash levels and is closed to new and existing investors. Managing inflows and capacity carefully remains central to maintaining the Fund’s return profile and its ability to act nimbly when attractive, higher complexity opportunities arise.
