Carlyle Credit Income Fund

Carlyle Credit Income Fund

The Carlyle Credit Income Fund operates as a closed-end fund trading on the New York Stock Exchange. It was formed through the conversion of a prior vehicle and focuses predominantly on investing in equity and junior debt tranches of collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs. The fund is managed by an affiliate of The Carlyle Group, a global alternative asset manager. While the specific founding date of this vehicle is tied to a corporate reorganization, its strategy draws on Carlyle's decades-long history as one of the world's largest CLO managers. Strategy and deployment center on owning the residual equity interests in CLOs, which are structured vehicles that pool broadly syndicated senior secured loans. The fund may also take positions in mezzanine CLO debt and warehouse facilities. This approach aims to generate current income through quarterly distributions. The underlying loan portfolios are diversified across hundreds of corporate obligors, predominantly from US-based issuers. Carlyle's scale as a CLO issuer provides the fund with a structural advantage in sourcing and managing these assets. The fund is structured as an externally managed corporation, not a traditional 1940 Act fund, and its investment manager is Carlyle Global Credit Investment Management L.L.C. The net asset value and market price performance are reported quarterly, with the fund seeking to maintain a stable distribution policy. In recent periods, the manager has focused on optimizing the amortization profiles of older CLOs held in the portfolio and reinvesting proceeds into newly issued CLO equity at wider spreads. May 2023: The fund completed its conversion from its predecessor vehicle structure and began trading under its current strategy. The key structural differentiator is permanent capital. Unlike a typical private credit drawdown fund, the Carlyle Credit Income Fund is a continuously listed vehicle, freeing its portfolio managers from the pressure of forced asset sales at cycle troughs to return capital to limited partners. This architecture allows the management team to time reinvestment into CLO equity when spreads are most attractive, a structural flexibility that private commingled funds with finite lives simply do not have.