There was a time when a CLO manager left the names of the deals it acquired unchanged, but the last few months have been different. Blackstone finished the rebrand of all of the former AIG CLOs to Clover CLOs following its acquisition of AIG Credit Management in February.

Whitestar did something similar to its latest purchase, rebranding its Whitehorse CLOs as Demus CLOs last month.

One trend that hasn’t changed though is making sure the newly acquired deals are clearly differentiated. That’s important for when you need to blame the old shop’s credit picking skills…

At Creditflux we’re sympathetic to the calls to move to private credit CLOs. The underlying assets in these deals moved up from the middle market many years ago, and direct lending deals are only getting larger, so middle market CLO is something of a misnomer.

But we’re reluctant to change a phrase everyone is familiar with. And, more importantly, this is a sector that runs on acronyms. And we’re not convinced that PC CLO will ever take off.