In May, we scored a private credit note 79 out of 100. Two months on, that read has held up: the protections the score rested on — the collateral floor, near-zero delinquency, deep diversification — have been tested against the borrower's own reporting, and have done exactly what we said they would. What follows is the evidence, claim by claim, that the methodology works, alongside the limits we won't pretend past.

Every deal we score is graded across three pillars — Deal Structure, Operator Track Record, and Market Conditions — and assigned a tier from Featured Dossier down to Not Cleared. This piece tests one of those scores against reality.

Why We Go Back

Anyone can score a deal the day it's offered. The score worth anything is the one that survives contact with what the asset actually does next. So we go back. We take a deal we scored, pull what the position has done since, and hold it against the specific claims the score was built on. Not whether it paid — this note doesn't mature until 2027 — but whether the protections we credited have actually protected.

The Score Being Tested

The subject is a Miami-based merchant cash advance lender that raises senior, asset-based notes on a private credit platform. We have a longer record on this borrower than almost any name we cover — which is exactly why it's the right one to test first.

Entry Score Status
Sr. 2026-3
Dossier No. 002 — May 2026
 79 / 100 On the Docket
Sr. 2026-6
Docket No. 007 — June 2026
 78 / 100 On the Docket
Four Protections It Rested On

Neither score rested on optimism. Each rested on four protections we said would have to carry the risk.

Protection What It Guards Against
Alignment They buy into an advance only when the originator keeps more than half its own capital in it — the structural block against an originator offloading its worst paper while keeping the best for itself.
A Hard Collateral Floor A 20% overcollateralization requirement that suspends the borrower's reinvestment rights the moment it's breached.
Diversification A pool of many small, self-liquidating advances rather than a handful of large bets.
Seniority A first-priority claim on that pool, ring-fenced in its own SPV.

Four mechanisms, each of which either works or doesn't. Here is what they have done.

What Happened Since

We monitor the position through Percent's investor surveillance reporting. Two months in, each protection, tested against the data:

Protection What the Data Shows
Alignment Held. The failure we were guarding against — an originator's bad advances surfacing as delinquency — hasn't appeared. Not a single advance in the pool is more than 60 days past due, and the slice even 31 to 60 days late rounds to a fraction of one percent. The screen we said mattered more than the coupon is doing precisely what we said it would.
Collateral Floor Held. The 20% overcollateralization line has cleared every weekly test since before we scored the note, and hasn't broken through once across the trailing year. The trigger we credited was never theoretical — it has been binding and satisfied the whole way down.
Diversification Confirmed. The pool runs to more than 1,400 individual advances, with no single borrower above roughly half a percent of it and the ten largest together under four percent. The idiosyncratic-blowup risk we scored down is genuinely absent, not merely asserted.
Collateral Performance Paying. The advances are self-liquidating as designed: the seasoned vintages have already returned more than the capital originally advanced against them, and collections on retired advances have run above principal.

None of that is a promise about the note's return. It is the scored protections doing, in the data, exactly what we said they would have to.

Where the Score Still Holds Back

We didn't give it full marks, and we still wouldn't.

Gap Why It Stands
Self-Reported Data The performance data is the borrower's own, not independently audited.
No Secondary Market There is no exit before maturity.
One Level Removed They buy participations rather than originating, so its credit judgment sits at the funder-selection level.

Those gaps were printed as the reason the score was 79 and not higher. They haven't closed, and the strong data above doesn't erase them — it sits alongside them. A framework that only tells you what's strong is a brochure.

What This Proves — and What It Doesn't

What it proves. This is the methodology working. We grade every deal on the things that decide whether it holds — how it's structured, who's operating it, and the market it sits in. For this merchant cash advance lender, we graded the structure and the operator as strong, and named exactly why. Two months of the borrower's own data has now confirmed both: the structural protections functioned, and the operator ran the book the way a credible operator does. When our score marks a deal solid on structure and operator, this is what that score is seeing — and here it saw it correctly, in advance of the data.

What it doesn't. A score grades how well a deal is built and who is running it. It does not predict what the market will do to that deal, and it does not guarantee the final return — this note doesn't mature until November 2027. A sharp downturn could still stress even a well-built structure; that is precisely why the collateral floor exists, and self-reported data remains self-reported. So read this for exactly what it is: evidence the structural call was right, not a claim that the investment is finished or won.

Sourcing Note

The Docket has no placement relationship with Percent or the merchant cash advance lender and receives no compensation from either. Scores are independent editorial judgment based on information available at each review. Performance observations here are drawn from Percent's investor surveillance reporting, available to platform investors; specific proprietary figures and reporting are not reproduced.

The Docket

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The Docket's scoring represents independent editorial judgment based on information available at the time of review. Scores are not investment advice, recommendations to invest or not invest, projections of future returns, or representations about the accuracy of any borrower's or platform's disclosures. This retrospective does not claim that any note has repaid, will repay, or will perform as scored, and past scoring is not a guarantee of future results. All investment decisions are the sole responsibility of the reader. The Docket is not a registered investment advisor, broker-dealer, or fund manager.