Armstrong's eight points read as a coherent vision of where financial infrastructure is heading. Taken together, they describe a system that settles faster, costs less, operates continuously, and extends access to participants currently excluded by legacy intermediaries. That direction is broadly correct and the progress toward it is measurable.

The question worth asking is: if everything I currently hold dropped 60% tomorrow and stayed there for eighteen months, what would I do? Do I have a defined answer to that question, or do I have a vague intention to "hold through it" that has never been pressure-tested?

n traditional asset classes, information quality is imperfect but it is at least partially filtered. Analyst reports carry institutional accountability. Audited financials are a legal requirement. Regulatory disclosures create a minimum floor of verifiability, however flawed. None of this guarantees good decisions, but it does mean that the information environment has some structural resistance to the most obvious distortions.

Understanding private credit risk informs several practical decisions for investors and allocators.