



The software rout is spreading pain to the debt markets
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The steep selloff in software stocks is spreading to the debt market. Pressured by growing worries about the disruptive potential of new AI coding tools, shares of large software companies such as Salesforce and ServiceNow have been sliding for months.
But now the prices of software-company bonds and loans are also dropping. That expanding pain is worrying many on Wall Street, because software has come to assume an outsize presence in the corporate-debt market—the result of a wave of private-equity buyouts that stretched from the late 2010s through the early 2020s. A downturn in the sector has the potential to drag down other areas of the market, cooling what has been a humming credit engine.
Software currently makes up 13% of the Morningstar LSTA U.S. Leveraged Loan Index—which tracks speculative-grade loans that are originated by banks and broadly distributed to investors—more than double the share of the next largest sector. The sector makes up an even larger percentage of private-credit loans made by asset managers directly to companies, with estimates putting the share at around 20% to a third of those loans.
Since mid-January, the prices of loans issued by the likes of Cloudera, a data analytics company, and Qlik, the maker of business intelligence software, have sunk by around 10 cents on the dollar or more, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Overall, the average price of software company loans in the Morningstar LSTA index has dropped to 90.51 cents on the dollar, as of Wednesday, from 94.71 cents at the end of last year, according to PitchBook LCD. Many software-company loans will mature in just a few years, and investors and analysts say there is little indication
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