Palmer Square Capital Management, a credit firm managing approximately $37 billion in assets, is reported to be exploring a sale of the business, with advisers said to be soliciting offers and narrowing a list of potential bidders.
The Kansas-based company is led by the husband-and-wife team of Chris and Angie Long. The firm has grown into one of the larger issuers of collateralized loan obligations, with a CLO platform that represents roughly $27 billion of its total assets under management, according to S&P Global data cited in reporting on the process. The expansion of the U.S. CLO market is reflected in a more than fourfold increase to over $1.3 trillion in the last 15 years.
Chris Long founded Palmer Square in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, initially funding the firm with about $10 million of his own capital. Angie Long joined the business a few years prior to Palmer Square beginning to manage CLOs in 2013. Within the firm, Angie Long holds the role of chief investment officer while Chris Long serves as chairman and chief executive officer.
Beyond its CLO business, Palmer Square’s investment activities encompass opportunistic credit, private credit and a publicly traded business development company. Insiders involved in the process have indicated that the firm has hired bankers to field interest and progressively narrow the pool of potential suitors, though further details about the timetable or prospective buyers have not been disclosed.
Given the prominence of Palmer Square’s CLO platform in its asset base, the outcome of any sale could be material to the firm’s organizational control and to the management of those structured-credit assets. At present, the process is described as exploratory, with advisers actively managing outreach to interested parties.