Ares Management Is Down 33% From Its High, Its Business Has Never Been Stronger

Key Stats for Ares Management Stock

• 52-Week Range: $95.80 – $195.26
• Current Price: $129.34
• Street Mean Target: $145.24
• TIKR Model Target: ~$256 (mid case, realized 12/31/30)
• Annualized IRR: ~16% per year
• Q1 2026 Fee-Related Earnings: $464.4M (up 26% YoY)
• Q1 2026 AUM: $644.3B (up 18% YoY)

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Ares Management Corporation (ARES) has spent most of 2026 getting punished for crimes it didn’t commit. When Blue Owl restricted investor withdrawals from a retail-facing private credit fund in February, the selloff spread instantly across the entire alternative asset management sector.

Ares fell roughly 3% that day, caught in a wave that hit Apollo, Blackstone, and KKR as well. Then the pressure kept building. In early June, fears flared again when redemption caps spread across the industry, and Ares fell another 4% in a single session alongside its peers. By April 6, the stock had fallen 48% from its all-time high.

The Private Credit Panic That Wasn’t

To understand the selloff, you need to understand what Ares actually does. Ares is a global alternative investment manager, meaning it raises large pools of capital from institutional investors, pension funds, and wealthy individuals, then deploys that capital across private credit, real estate, infrastructure, and private equity. The firm earns management fees on those assets regardless of what public markets are doing on any given day. The stock price is not the business.

The private credit panic of 2026 began with a structural concern: retail investors in semi-liquid private credit funds were requesting withdrawals faster than some managers could process.

Blue Owl restricted quarterly redemptions for one of its flagship retail funds after investors requested to withdraw nearly 22% of the fund’s shares in a single quarter. That spooked the broader market, which began treating every alt manager as if the same problem was hiding on their balance sheets.

Ares got swept up in the same current. The comparison doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. CEO Michael Arougheti noted that the stress in private credit was primarily tied to private equity exposure rather than the diversified, largely institutional book that Ares manages. And the firm’s Q1 results told a very different story than the stock price suggested.

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Record Fundraising, Rising Fees, and a Stock Nobody Wants

Ares reported first-quarter 2026 results that were, by any reasonable measure, excellent. Record first quarter fundraising hit $29.5 billion, up more than 45% year over year. Total AUM reached $644.3 billion, up 18% from the prior year. Fee-related earnings, the metric that best captures the firm’s recurring revenue engine, came in at $464.4 million, up 26%.

What makes Ares structurally different from the firms at the center of the redemption fears is the composition of its capital. As of Q1, 85% of Ares’ AUM sat in perpetual capital or long-dated funds, and 93% of management fees were earned from those same vehicles.

This is not a business that depends on quarterly redemption windows staying open. The fee base is durable almost by design.

CFO Jarrod Phillips said it plainly on the Q1 call: the firm had nearly $160 billion of available capital and a record investment pipeline, positioning it to deploy opportunistically regardless of short-term sentiment swings.

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When the Multiple Tells You More Than the Price

Ares’ forward earnings multiple peaked above 40x in early 2025, when private credit enthusiasm was running hot, and investors were paying a substantial premium for the firm’s growth trajectory. Today that multiple sits around 20x, right at the long-term historical mean.

That matters because the earnings estimates have not collapsed in line with the stock. The multiple compressions reflect sentiment, not a fundamental deterioration.

The Street’s mean target sits around $145, and analysts broadly expect earnings to grow around 37% this fiscal year. The gap between what the business is doing and what the stock is pricing in has rarely been this wide.

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How Far Could Ares Stock Go

TIKR’s model targets around $256 for Ares in the mid case, realized at the end of 2030, representing an annualized return of roughly 16% per year from the current price. The model assumes revenue growth in the low teens on a compounded basis, with net income margins expanding toward around 29% over the forecast period. The key lever is management fee growth driven by continued AUM expansion as the platform scales.

The longer horizon here is intentional. Ares is not a quarterly earnings story. The firm’s value compounds through fundraising cycles, deployment decisions, and the patient accumulation of fee-paying assets. The model’s low case still points to around $290 by 2030, a scenario where growth slows and multiple contractions continue, yet still implies a meaningful positive outcome.

The clearest risk is that the private credit concerns facing the broader industry prove more structural than cyclical. Congress has opened inquiries into how firms like Ares market, value, and manage their private credit vehicles, and regulatory pressure on the asset class could weigh on flows. Elevated redemption demand across the industry also raises questions about retail appetite for illiquid strategies.

That said, Ares’ institutionally heavy capital base, diversification across credit, real estate, infrastructure, and secondaries, and consistent multi-year AUM growth make it a fundamentally different business from the names making headlines.

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Should You Invest in Ares Management Corporation

The core question for Ares is not whether the private credit industry faces some near-term friction. It does. The question is whether those pressures are severe enough to impair a business that just posted record fundraising, growing management fees, and expanding margins, and whose stock now trades at the lowest valuation multiple in years.

TIKR gives you the tools to look at this yourself. Pull up Ares on TIKR, examine the fee-related earnings trend, check how the forward multiple has moved relative to its historical range, and run your own assumptions through the model. The numbers don’t always match the narrative, and right now that gap is worth paying attention to.

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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!