over the last two weeks terrascend trssf verano vrnof and acreage acrdf have obtained new credit agreements with interest rates in the low teens demonstrating that tier one msos still have solid albeit expensive access to the credit markets smaller public and private companies have constrained access to debt and rates are likely to be high and contain equity kickers for many of these companies companies with liquidity pressures including maturing debt may be subjected to effective costs as high as 30 accordingly we are watching liquidity more carefully and have recently adjusted the viridian credit tracker scoring model to place a higher weight on this factor the companies on the graph are the 18 us cultivation  retail companies in the viridian database with market caps between 10m and 200 the green bars in the chart show the viridian credit score for each company arranged in increasing order of credit quality the model uses 11 financial and marketbased variables to evaluate four credit quality aspects liquidity leverage profitability and size the viridian credit model is particularly valuable for companies in this size range because ten of the eighteen have no analyst coverage the purple line shows the relative ranking on our liquidity score which considers the companys liquid assets its free cash flow burn and its nearterm liabilities including debt maturities companies with liquidity ranks below 12 will likely require incremental financing over the next year ten of the eighteen companies on the chart have negative cash flow from operations in the most recent quarter the orange line shows the viridian leverage rank ranks below ten generally coincide with debt to market cap measures over 3x which we consider indicative of financial stress viridians multifactor model considers the tradeoffs inherent in each companys financial picture for example marimed cse scores low on liquidity and is likely to require nearterm financing however it has one of the lowest overall leverage ratings giving us confidence that it should be able to obtain funding the constrained capital market environment makes it critical that debt and equity investors monitor credit quality closely and the viridian credit tracker model can be a valuable tool the viridian capital chart of the week highlights key investment valuation and ma trends taken from the viridian cannabis deal tracker the viridian cannabis deal tracker provides the market intelligence that cannabis companies investors and acquirers utilize to make informed decisions regarding capital allocation and ma strategy the deal tracker is a proprietary information service that monitors capital raise and ma activity in the legal cannabis cbd and psychedelics industries each week the tracker aggregates and analyzes all closed deals and segments each according to key metrics   deals by industry sector to track the flow of capital and ma deals by one of 12 sectors  from cultivation to brands to software   deal structure equitydebt for capital raises cashstockearnout for ma status of the company announcing the transaction public vs private   principals to the transaction issuerinvestorlenderacquirer key deal terms pricing and valuation   deals by location of issuerbuyerseller to track the flow of capital and ma deals by state and country since its inception in 2015 the viridian cannabis deal tracker has tracked and analyzed more than 2500 capital raises and 1000 ma transactions totaling over 50 billion in aggregate value the preceding article is from one of our external contributors it does not represent the opinion of benzinga and has not been edited