Stuart Waugh: Retail BDC Noise Obscures Institutional Credit
Northleaf's Stuart Waugh explains why retail BDC volatility misleads investors about the $10T institutional private credit market.
$31B Investor on AI Infrastructure, Private Equity, and Secondaries
With David Weisburd, Stuart Waugh · Sunday, August 30, 2026
Stuart Waugh, Managing Partner of Northleaf Capital Partners, joins David Weisburd to discuss how the AI boom is creating an unprecedented bottleneck in power and physical infrastructure. Waugh explains Northleaf's thesis on the $40 trillion addressable infrastructure market, the structural advantages of mid-market private equity and private credit, the evolution of the secondaries market into a strategic rebalancing tool, and the organizational lessons learned scaling Northleaf from a five-person team to managing $31 billion in assets.
Key takeaways
- Retail Business Development Companies (BDCs) face headlines about redemption pressure and shifting sentiment, but Waugh notes BDCs represent only a small fraction of the wider private credit market. Read more →
- Secondaries have shifted from distressed fire-sale venues to standard portfolio management tools for institutional CIOs rebalancing liquid allocations. Read more →
- Northleaf Capital Partners grew from a five-person team spinning out of TD Bank in 2009 to a multi-asset manager overseeing $31 billion across private equity, private credit, and infrastructure. Read more →
- Stuart Waugh calculates a $40 trillion addressable infrastructure funding gap over the next decade as digital compute demands outstrip physical utility capacity. Read more →
4 articles from this episode
Why Mid-Market Secondaries Win on Mosaic Bids and GP Consent
Northleaf's Stuart Waugh on why secondaries remain undercapitalized, how stigma vanished, and why mosaic bids beat single-buyer deals.
Scaling Northleaf to $31B: LP Co-Creation and Cultural Drift
Stuart Waugh explains how Northleaf scaled from a 5-person spinout to $31B by co-creating mandates with LPs and enforcing strict hiring discipline.
Why AI's Real Bottleneck Is Power and Infrastructure
Stuart Waugh explains why the $40T infrastructure gap makes power generation and behind-the-meter data centers AI's biggest investment opportunity.
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