The first piece established the gap: roughly $1 trillion of marked software equity, priced for a multiple regime that ended with the Airtable print.1 The second established the constraint: the system is solvent, but the macro is taking away the time the workout needs.2
This piece answers the question everyone asks next. When?
The honest answer is that private markets do not reprice when reality changes. They reprice when a calendar event forces recognition. The information is already public — the Airtable comp, the Fed's own software warnings, the 73-cent tail-end prints.3 What stands between the information and the marks is a set of appointments.
The appointments have dates.
Window 1: September–November 2026 — the redemption collision
Semi-liquid private credit funds run quarterly redemption windows. The third-quarter window is the first one where investors submit requests after the Airtable print, after a summer of software markdown headlines, and after watching the first quarter's redeemers get gated.
Gates are supposed to stop runs. In semi-liquid vehicles, they teach the opposite lesson. Cliffwater capped redemptions at 7% against nearly 14% requested; Blackstone used balance-sheet capital to let 8% out; Blue Owl froze a fund permanently.4 Every investor who watched learned the same thing: the last one out gets frozen. That lesson converts into pre-emptive redemption requests, and those requests land in September.
They get honored or capped in October. Third-quarter BDC filings arrive in November carrying software marks that now have a public, board-approved, all-cash comp to answer to — because the Airtable transaction is expected to close later in 2026, converting the announcement into an official reference price.5
The first tranche of recognition doesn't require anyone to change their mind. It requires a filing deadline.
Window 2: February–April 2027 — the audit
This is the window to circle.
December 31 marks get signed in February and March, and auditors are the one party in this system with liability exposure and no fee stream from optimism. They cannot sign year-end valuations that ignore an arm's-length software comp at 2.7x ARR, plus whatever continuation-vehicle prints accumulate between now and then. Pension funds then publish fiscal-year results carrying those signed marks.
Nothing crashes in this window. Something arguably more consequential happens: the mark gap stops being a thesis and becomes a disclosed number in audited financial statements. The write-down enters the official record, and every LP report, every funding-ratio calculation, and every allocation decision downstream of it inherits the new number.
Window 3: 2027–2028 — the maturity wall
The 2021–2022 vintage loans were predominantly five-to-seven-year paper. The maturities stack through 2027 and 2028 — S&P has flagged leveraged borrowers' massive refinancing needs running through 2028 as a defining credit-market issue.6
This is where paper losses become cash events. A company that cannot refinance at current rates against reduced marks produces the pattern already on display: Pluralsight's lenders taking the keys from Vista; Thoma Bravo's Medallia default expected to cost the sponsor as much as $5.1 billion.7
The credit layer's losses — whatever the earlier windows size them at — crystallize here, not before.
Accelerants and the one decelerant
Three things pull Window 2's severity into Window 1.
- An oil shock through Hormuz that closes the IPO window outright.
- A failed software continuation vehicle — not a discounted one, a no-bid, which would be the deferral machinery visibly jamming in public.
- Or the anticipated AI listings pricing weak, which flips the exit narrative and triggers the denominator effect across every allocation-capped institution simultaneously.8
That last one is the live wire, because it is the same event this series has traced from both sides: the IPO window private equity needs is held open by the valuations the compression targets next.
One thing pushes the other way. Midterm-year fiscal stimulus plus a Fed cut buys the workout another two quarters — and deferral machinery runs on exactly that kind of borrowed time.
The educated guess
Stated the way a position would be stated: the first visible tranche hits in the October–November redemption and filing cycle. The official accounting arrives with year-end audits in February–March 2027. Cash losses crystallize against the 2027–2028 maturity wall.
Not one moment. Three... each forced by a calendar nobody can lobby.
The market doesn't need to discover anything. It needs to reach the dates.