Ares Management Corporation is a leading global alternative investment manager, publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ARES and headquartered in Los Angeles, California. The firm operates four distinct but complementary investment groups — Credit, Real Assets, Private Equity, and Secondaries — and serves an investor base that spans large institutional clients, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and a fast-growing private wealth channel. Its particular strength in private credit, where it operates one of the world's largest direct lending platforms, has made it a central figure in the structural shift of corporate financing away from traditional banks.
Website: aresmgmt.com
Founders: Antony Ressler, Michael Arougheti, David Kaplan, John H. Kissick, and Bennett Rosenthal
Company type: Public (NYSE: ARES); S&P 500 component
Regions served: North America, South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East, across more than 55 offices in more than 25 countries
What does Ares Management offer?
Ares organises its investment capabilities into four groups, each of which the firm describes as a market leader based on assets under management and investment performance. Its strategies span:
- Credit — the firm's largest and founding discipline, encompassing direct lending to middle-market and large-cap companies, tradable and non-investment-grade corporate credit, and alternative credit including asset-based finance, specialty finance, and structured products
- Real Assets — real estate equity and debt strategies across direct investments, non-traded REITs, and publicly listed vehicles, alongside infrastructure and energy investing
- Private Equity — majority and shared-control investments primarily in under-capitalised businesses, with a focus on healthcare, services, energy, industrials, and consumer sectors across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific
- Secondaries — secondary market solutions for limited partners and general partners across private equity, real estate, infrastructure, and credit asset classes, through a group with more than three decades of secondary market experience
Ares serves its investor base through a range of vehicle structures: commingled institutional funds, separately managed accounts, publicly traded vehicles such as Ares Capital Corporation (its flagship business development company), sub-advised funds, and perpetual wealth vehicles aimed at individual investors. It has also built a dedicated Ares Wealth Management Solutions platform to broaden access to its strategies for financial advisors, private banks, wirehouses, independent broker-dealers, and registered investment advisors.
A defining feature of Ares's investment approach is its credit-oriented mindset across all four groups — a discipline rooted in the backgrounds of its founders, several of whom came from leveraged finance roles before establishing the firm. The firm conducts proprietary research across more than 55 industries and deploys capital across the full capital structure, from senior secured debt to common equity, which it argues provides differentiated insight into relative value.
Ares Management in the market
Ares competes directly with the largest alternative asset managers in the world, including Blackstone, KKR, Apollo Global Management, Brookfield, and Carlyle. Within that peer group, it has carved out a particularly strong position in private credit — an asset class that has grown rapidly as regulatory constraints on banks created space for non-bank lenders to finance corporate acquisitions, recapitalisations, and growth. Ares is widely regarded as one of the largest self-originating direct lenders in the United States, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
The firm's fundraising trajectory illustrates the scale of investor appetite for its strategies. In 2025, Ares raised a record $113 billion in new capital, and its wealth management business grew particularly quickly, with that channel's assets under management rising 69% year over year. Those figures reflect both the strength of private credit as an asset class and Ares's deliberate push to extend institutional-grade alternatives to individual investors — a strategy the firm has described as the "retailisation" of private markets. CEO Michael Arougheti has pushed back against the notion that retail investors receive inferior deal flow, arguing that only the largest platforms with the highest-quality deal pipelines have sufficient scale to serve both institutional and wealth clients from the same investment pool.
Ares's competitive positioning rests heavily on the size and reach of its origination network. In private credit, the ability to source deals directly — rather than through intermediaries or broadly syndicated loan markets — is a core differentiator, giving the firm better pricing, structural protections, and relationship depth with borrowers. As competition between private credit managers and the broadly syndicated loan market has intensified heading into 2026, with some borrowers shifting toward cheaper public financing, Ares has responded by emphasising disciplined underwriting and, in some strategies, lower leverage to reduce sensitivity to credit stress. The firm has also continued to expand internationally, identifying Asia as an area with less competition and attractive spread premiums relative to more established Western markets.
Its Secondaries Group adds another layer of competitive differentiation. As institutional investors seek liquidity from existing private market commitments, the secondaries market has seen record deal flow, and Ares — through its Landmark platform — has positioned itself as one of the most active buyers and restructuring counterparties across private equity, real estate, infrastructure, and credit secondaries. That combination of primary origination and secondary liquidity provision gives Ares an unusually broad toolkit relative to more specialised managers, and allows it to serve clients at multiple points in the private markets lifecycle.
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