Key Stats for Ares Management Stock
- Current Price: $113.87
- Target Price (Mid): ~$230
- Street Target: ~$146
- Potential Total Return: ~102% over the next 4.5 years
- Annualized IRR: ~17% / year
- Earnings Reaction: +0.82% (May 1, 2026)
- Max Drawdown: -49.94% (March 12, 2026)
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What Happened?
Ares Management (ARES) has spent 2026 absorbing every fear investors hold about private credit. The stock is down around 30% this year and trades about 42% below its 52-week high of $195.26. On June 24, it fell 5.72% to $113.87 with no company-specific news. The sector moved, and Ares moved with it.
The market has decided private credit is the next problem, and Ares, as one of the largest direct lenders in the world, is the name people sell when fear flares. The question is whether that fear points at something real inside Ares or just at a headline.
CEO Michael Arougheti tried to answer directly at the Morgan Stanley US Financials Conference on June 10. He spent the hour separating what the headlines say from what his portfolio data shows. His answers matter because they are specific and falsifiable.
What the CEO said about the redemption scare
Redemptions have been the loudest fear. Several managers capped withdrawals from retail private credit funds earlier this year, and the market read that as a crack in the foundation. Arougheti went at it with his own numbers.
In Ares’ non-traded business development company, a fund that lends to private companies and is sold partly to wealthy individuals, redemption requests reached about 11% in a recent window. The detail that matters is who asked. He said those requests came from fewer than 5% of investors, mostly smaller institutions and family offices outside the United States, a breakdown later reported by Reuters.
His framing was that of a fiduciary. If 95% of investors want to keep the exposure, draining fund liquidity to pay the 5% who want out is a bad trade for everyone who stayed. He also noted wealth is only about 10% of Ares’ private credit business, so as he put it, “to the extent that the growth in wealth for private credit is slowing, that deployment just shifts into the institutional funds.”
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Why the portfolio data undercuts the distress story
On credit quality, Arougheti leaned on metrics that are harder to spin. He said loan-to-values across the corporate book sit around 45%, meaning loans are backed by roughly 55% equity value underneath them. He put non-accrual rates, the share of loans no longer paying as agreed, in the low 2% range, below historical averages. Portfolio company profits are still growing around 10%.
None of this proves the bears wrong. Private credit marks move slowly, and a forward-looking market can worry about what the data has not caught yet. But it explains the disconnect: the fear is about tomorrow, and it is concentrated in US wealth.
The growth engine has not stalled
While sentiment cratered, the business kept compounding. Ares closed its largest first-quarter fundraise ever at about $30 billion, up more than 45% year over year, and assets under management reached $644 billion. Management fees, the recurring core of the model, topped $1 billion in a quarter for the first time, up 22%. The firm also holds roughly $158 billion of available capital to deploy while competitors pull back.
Arougheti added that the wealth channel did about $3.6 billion gross in the second quarter, up 10% year over year, “despite all of the anxieties around private credit.”
That gap is the trade. Ares trades near 18x forward earnings, well below the 32x it carried a year ago, even as fee-paying assets keep climbing. Bears argue spreads compress as competition and lower base rates erode private credit returns, leaving 18x too rich if defaults rise. Bulls argue the panic has detached the price from a business posting record fundraising and 20%-plus fee growth. How that resolves depends on whether the model’s assumptions survive a tougher credit cycle.
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TIKR Advanced Model Analysis
- Current Price: $113.87
- Target Price (Mid): ~$230
- Potential Total Return: ~102%
- Annualized IRR: around 17% / year
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Two drivers carry revenue: continued growth in fee-paying assets as record dry powder converts to fee-earning deployments, and the still-scaling wealth and infrastructure channels. The margin driver is operating leverage, with net income margins modeled toward the high 20s as Ares centralizes back-office costs.
The primary risk is the one the market is already pricing: a real deterioration in private credit, through rising non-accruals, spread compression, or broad redemptions, would undercut both the deployment and margin paths. The upside is that the fear proves overblown and the multiple re-rates as fee growth compounds. The downside is the cracks are real, marks catch down to them, and the discount turns out to be the market seeing the problem first.
Conclusion
The next real test is second-quarter earnings, expected in early August. Watch fee-paying AUM and management fees first. Fees holding above $1 billion with growth near 20% would confirm that 2025’s fundraising is converting to recurring revenue on schedule. That is the good outcome. The bad outcome is non-accruals climbing meaningfully above the low-2% range Arougheti cited, or redemptions broadening beyond the small, non-US group he described. By August, the portfolio data will start telling you which.
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Should You Invest in Ares Management?
The only way to really know is to look at the numbers yourself. TIKR gives you free access to the same institutional-quality financial data that professional analysts use to answer exactly that question.
Pull up Ares Management, and you’ll see years of historical financials, what Wall Street analysts expect for revenue and earnings in the quarters ahead, how valuation multiples have moved over time, and whether price targets are trending up or down.
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Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
