This is the deal that fundamentally changed how I evaluate private credit.
I invested in the Pelorus Cannabis Fund in September 2023 — a private credit vehicle originating loans to cannabis operators with heavy construction lending exposure. Within five months, my annualized yield dropped from 10.92% to 4.55%. Shortly after, roughly 10 additional loans went delinquent. A targeted 12% return became roughly 2%, and my capital has been gated for over 18 months with no line of sight to redemption.
On the sponsor: Pelorus has been professional and willing to engage. They get on the phone, they explain what's happening, they haven't gone dark. But here's what sticks with me — I had dinner with the team shortly before investing and spent real time building a relationship. Meanwhile, their portfolio was already showing stress I wasn't made aware of. I get it — they're raising capital and that's part of the business. But there's a difference between a sponsor who communicates well and a sponsor who is fully transparent, and that distinction matters. It doesn't make them bad people. It does make me evaluate sponsor transparency very differently now.
The core issue was portfolio composition. Construction loans in cannabis are a different animal — federally illegal borrowers with limited banking access, collateral with minimal alternative-use value, and binary outcomes on mid-build projects. When borrowers stalled, delinquencies cascaded.
Before this deal, I wasn't pulling loan tapes. I wasn't stress-testing delinquency scenarios. I didn't understand the structural difference between a bridge loan on a cash-flowing property and a construction loan on a project that could stall at 60% completion. Now I do. Every private credit fund I evaluate today gets scrutinized at the loan-level because of what I learned here.
Lesson for other LPs: Pull the loan tape. Understand the delinquency rates. Ask what percentage of the book is in construction, what the average LTV looks like on those loans, and what happens to collateral value if a project stops mid-build. Lesson I had to learn the hard way but I became a significantly better investor because of it.
