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What this page is: Delvantic's full research page for Ares Management Corporation (ARES) — AI-driven forensic equity research: mechanical valuation models (DCF, EPV, anchored-PE, scenario) plus three independent AI lenses (Quality / Value / Sentiment). Everything below is rendered server-side; you are not missing content that requires JavaScript. All scores are predictions and research opinions, not financial advice.
Our current read (analysis of 2026-08-23): Designation Low · Gem Score -56 (−100…+100 Quality+Value blend) · Quality -22 · Value -83 · Sentiment -3 (timing only, not weighted) · Composite fair value $123.70 vs $126.51 at analysis
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profile-header/price-overview— company profile, live quote, market capextended-analysis— the core: three AI lens reads with findings, scores, and the analyst memofuture-predictions— our forward price-band predictionsmarket-narrative/ai-findings/gpt-critique— narrative context, cross-model findings, and an adversarial critique of our own analysis (near the end of the document)- Members-only sections (render as login gates for anonymous readers):
price-history,income-trend,key-metrics,financials(statement tables),insider-trading. The analysis above is public; the raw data tables require a free account.
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any ticker resolves at delvantic.com/stock/TICKER ·
raw inputs are public-company filings and market data (via licensed data feeds);
every model, score, lens read, and prediction on this page is Delvantic's own analysis.
Ares Management Corporation
ARES NYSEAres Management Corporation is a global alternative investment manager specializing in private markets strategies across credit, private equity, real assets, and secondary solutions. The firm structures and manages investment vehicles that provide institutional and high-net-worth clients with access to diversified, often non-public assets and financing opportunities. Its credit platform spans direct lending, syndicated loans, and other credit strategies, while its private equity business focuses on control and growth investments in companies across multiple industries. In real assets, Ares Management Corporation manages investments in real estate and infrastructure-oriented strategies. The company also offers secondary solutions, providing liquidity and portfolio management options to existing investors in private funds. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California and founded in 1997, Ares Management Corporation operates through a broad international footprint, serving clients across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East and playing a significant role in the global alternative asset management industry.
Price Overview
Price History (1 Year)
Revenue & Net Income Trend
| Period | Revenue | Net Income | Net Margin | YoY/QoQ |
|---|
Key Metrics
EPS (Diluted): 1.70
Total Equity: $4.28B
Shares: 310,212,941
Total Debt: $14.22B
Cash: $1.45B
EBITDA: $1.44B
Total Debt: $14.22B
Cash: $1.45B
Revenue: $5.60B
Revenue: $5.60B
Revenue: $5.60B
Total Equity: $4.28B
Tax Rate: 15.4%
Equity: $4.28B
Total Debt: $14.22B
Cash: $1.45B
Current Liabilities: $7.49B
Long-Term Debt: $11.97B
Total Debt: $14.22B
Total Equity: $4.28B
Shares: 310,212,941
Shares: 310,212,941
CapEx: $0.00
Shares: 310,212,941
Stock Price: $126.51
Net Income: $527.36M
Industry Benchmarks
Income Statement (Annual)
Last updated: Jul 27, 2026 12:42am (27d ago)| Metric | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $4.8B | $3.7B | $5.0B | $3.9B | $5.6B |
| Cost of Revenue | $1.2B | $1.5B | $1.5B | $1.7B | $2.6B |
| Gross Profit | $3.6B | $2.2B | $3.5B | $2.2B | $3.0B |
| Operating Expenses | $2.2B | $1.3B | $1.3B | $1.2B | $2.1B |
| Operating Income | $1.3B | $980.4M | $2.2B | $946.1M | $892.7M |
| Net Income | $408.8M | $167.5M | $474.3M | $463.7M | $527.4M |
| EBITDA | $1.5B | $1.3B | $2.4B | $2.1B | $1.4B |
| EPS | $2.24 | $0.87 | $2.44 | $2.04 | $1.71 |
| EPS (Diluted) | $2.15 | $0.87 | $2.42 | $2.04 | $1.70 |
Balance Sheet (Annual)
Last updated: Jul 27, 2026 12:16am (27d ago)| Metric | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cash & Equivalents | $1.4B | $1.1B | $1.5B | $2.7B | $1.4B |
| Total Current Assets | $2.6B | $2.2B | $2.8B | $4.2B | $8.9B |
| Total Assets | $21.6B | $22.0B | $24.7B | $24.9B | $28.6B |
| Current Liabilities | $4.0B | $3.4B | $3.8B | $4.3B | $7.5B |
| Long-Term Debt | $12.4B | $13.2B | $15.6B | $12.9B | $12.0B |
| Total Liabilities | $17.8B | $18.2B | $20.3B | $18.1B | $20.0B |
| Total Equity | $1.8B | $1.6B | $1.9B | $3.5B | $4.3B |
| Retained Earnings | -$89.4M | -$369.5M | -$495.1M | -$837.3M | -$1.5B |
Cash Flow (Annual)
Last updated: Jul 27, 2026 12:42am (27d ago)| Metric | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operating Cash Flow | -$2.6B | -$734.1M | -$233.3M | $2.8B | $3.3B |
| Capital Expenditure | — | — | — | — | — |
| Free Cash Flow | — | — | — | — | — |
| Acquisitions (net) | — | — | — | — | — |
| Net Debt Issued / (Repaid) | — | — | — | — | — |
| Dividends Paid | — | — | — | — | — |
| Stock Buybacks | — | — | — | — | — |
| Net Change in Cash | -$196.2M | $46.3M | -$41.7M | $1.2B | -$1.0B |
Growth Trends (YoY %)
Last updated: Jul 27, 2026 12:42am (27d ago)| Metric | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue Growth | -21.6% | +33.7% | -22.1% | +44.2% |
| Gross Profit Growth | -37.9% | +56.9% | -38.5% | +41.0% |
| Operating Income Growth | -27.2% | +123.3% | -56.8% | -5.6% |
| Net Income Growth | -59.0% | +183.1% | -2.2% | +13.7% |
| EBITDA Growth | -9.4% | +81.7% | -14.2% | -30.9% |
Dividend History (Last 20)
Last updated: Jul 25, 2026 3:23am (29d ago)| Date | Dividend | Declaration | Record | Payment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-16 | $1.35 | — | — | — |
| 2026-03-17 | $1.35 | — | — | — |
| 2025-12-17 | $1.12 | — | — | — |
| 2025-09-16 | $1.12 | — | — | — |
| 2025-06-16 | $1.12 | — | — | — |
| 2025-03-17 | $1.12 | — | — | — |
| 2024-12-17 | $0.93 | — | — | — |
| 2024-09-16 | $0.93 | — | — | — |
| 2024-06-14 | $0.93 | — | — | — |
| 2024-03-14 | $0.93 | — | — | — |
| 2023-12-14 | $0.77 | — | — | — |
| 2023-09-14 | $0.77 | — | — | — |
| 2023-06-15 | $0.77 | — | — | — |
| 2023-03-16 | $0.77 | — | — | — |
| 2022-12-15 | $0.61 | — | — | — |
| 2022-09-15 | $0.61 | — | — | — |
| 2022-06-15 | $0.61 | — | — | — |
| 2022-03-16 | $0.61 | — | — | — |
| 2021-12-16 | $0.47 | — | — | — |
| 2021-09-15 | $0.47 | — | — | — |
Deep Analysis
Risk : Reward — if the last quarter repeats
Live · as of 2026-08-23 02:38Even the bull case prices 55% below today — the ratio here measures the model-vs-market gap, not payoff odds. Another quarter like the worst recent one costs 69%. Caveat: revenue-DCF fits financials poorly (reported revenue omits net interest) — treat the legs as rough.
| Case | Growth | Margin | Fair value | vs price ($126.51) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bull — recovery | +28% | 14.2% | $56.38 | -55% |
| Base — stabilizes | +18% | 12.3% | $38.31 | -70% |
| Bear — keeps slipping | +9% | 10.5% | $25.35 | -80% |
| Stress — last quarter repeats | +24% | 10.4% | $38.72 | -69% |
Narrative Economics
market-narrative step).
Claude Reading
Reading the raw numbers first: Ares posted $5.60B revenue in 2025 vs $3.88B in 2024 — that 44% YoY jump is real but the annual series is genuinely lumpy ($4.76B in 2021, $3.73B in 2022, $4.99B in 2023, $3.88B in 2024, $5.60B in 2025), which is exactly what you'd expect from a manager where performance fees and carry crystallization drive the tape. Net income of $527M on $5.60B gives a 9.4% net margin — thin for an "asset-light compounder." Operating margin at 15.9% is well below what pure fee-based managers like BX or BAM print in good years. ROIC of 4.4% and ROA of 1.8% are the tells: this isn't a capital-light royalty stream, it's a $14.2B-debt-financed balance sheet earning modest spreads, with $4.28B of equity supporting it (D/E 3.3x). At $126.51 the market pays 74x earnings and 7.0x sales for that. That's a narrative multiple, not a cash-flow multiple.
Where I diverge from the prior stack: the Market Forces call ("over-levered credit manager experiencing portfolio impairments … extreme insider selling") is overwritten. The insider tape shows F-InKind (tax withholding on vesting, not discretionary sales), two P-Purchases in Feb 2026, and small S-Sales of a few hundred to ~1,100 shares — this is noise, not a distress signal, and the Secondary Signals correctly tag it as Net Insider Buying. Market Forces contradicts its own data feed. The Synthesis fair value of $68–$76 is directionally right on a pure DCF basis but ignores that alt managers have traded at premium multiples for a decade — KKR, BX, APO all sit at elevated P/Es because FRE (fee-related earnings) grows at 15–20% even when GAAP EPS is choppy. The Narrative layer is the most honest read here: ~$68 of fundamentals plus ~$58 of TAM-expansion story, and the story is plausible but not in the cash flows.
The contrarian argument I'd actually make: bears are anchoring on GAAP net income, which understates the economics of a fee-earning platform where AUM growth compounds silently. Operating CF of $3.27B against a $41.7B market cap is a 7.8% cash yield — not cheap, but not the 74x P/E horror show either. If you believe management fees on ~$450B+ AUM grow at 10–12% for five years, the earnings base doubles and today's price becomes ~35x forward on realized fee earnings — expensive but defensible for a category leader. The real risk isn't insider selling or "impairments"; it's fundraising velocity in private credit as spreads compress and direct-lending competition (from every bank, BDC, and sovereign wealth fund) erodes fee rates. That's the thesis-break, and it's not in Q1 2026 numbers yet. Also worth flagging: the 2026-Q1 revenue field is blank while NI shows $223.4M — data is incomplete, and the "44.2% recent revenue YoY" is comparing lumpy carry-heavy quarters, so don't lean on it.
GPT Reading
What jumps out to me is not just that Ares is “lumpy,” but that the accounting profile is fundamentally mismatched with the valuation investors are granting it. Over five annual periods, revenue has ricocheted from $4.76B to $3.73B to $4.99B to $3.88B to $5.60B, yet net income barely moved in proportion: $408.8M, $167.5M, $474.3M, $463.7M, $527.4M. That tells me the business is scaling AUM and fee streams, but not converting reported growth into a clean earnings ramp. The 2025 rebound to $5.60B of revenue looks impressive, but operating income actually fell from $946.1M in 2024 to $892.7M in 2025, so the biggest revenue year in the set was not the best operating year. That is the core issue for me: this is a manager with meaningful embedded franchise value, but the income statement does not justify paying 74.4x earnings and 7.0x sales unless you are underwriting a lot of future monetization that still has to arrive. The balance sheet reinforces the point. With $14.22B of debt against $1.45B cash and $4.28B equity, this is not a pristine fee annuity wearing a premium multiple; it is a leveraged alternative-asset platform whose equity valuation already assumes continued fundraising, stable fee rates, and benign credit conditions.
The quarterly pattern makes the same case. Revenue stepped from $677.7M in 2023’s third quarter to $735.8M, $874.9M, $842.0M, $1.24B, and then $1.00B in 2025’s first quarter, but margins are erratic even where data exists: 17.2%, -7.8%, 19.5%, 25.7%, 6.7%, then Q1 2026 has net income of $223.4M with revenue blank. That is not the profile of a simple compounding machine; it is the profile of a business where realizations, incentive income, and timing matter a lot. I do think operating cash flow of $3.27B in 2025 is the strongest counterpoint to a pure GAAP-bear case, because it says the franchise throws off real cash even if reported earnings look mediocre. But I would not leap from that to comfort: absent capex and free cash flow disclosure, and given the known noisiness in alternative managers’ cash timing, I’m not willing to treat OCF as a clean substitute for normalized earnings power. My read is straightforward: Ares deserves a premium to average financials because scale in alternatives matters, but today’s price assumes steadier economics than the reported history shows.
I agree with Opus on the most important conclusion: $126.51 is too rich, and the stock is being priced more on the alternatives-growth narrative than on demonstrated earnings power. I also agree with Opus that the “extreme insider selling” line is wrong; the tape is dominated by F-InKind entries and tiny discretionary sales, offset by February purchases of 10,000 shares and 480 shares, which is not a distress pattern. I further agree with Opus that the blank 2026-03-31 revenue field makes any crisp near-term revenue-growth story less reliable than it looks. Where I disagree is on his willingness to anchor fair value as high as $80–$95 and to frame the downside as mostly a lack of “margin of safety.” I think that is too forgiving of the actual economics in the annual data. A company with 2025 net margin of 9.4%, operating margin of 15.9%, ROIC of 4.4%, and debt-to-equity of 3.3x should not casually command even 45–55x current earnings unless you have a far clearer bridge to materially better normalized profitability than this dataset provides. Opus says the composite $68 fair value “under-weights the durability of management fee streams”; I think he under-weights how weak the translation from revenue to operating profit has been.
I also disagree with Opus’s partial defense of the sector premium by citing peers conceptually. He argues that alt managers trade on FRE-like metrics because fee-related earnings can grow 15–20% even when GAAP EPS is choppy. That is true as a sector framing, but in this briefing we do not actually have Ares FRE, fee-paying AUM, or a clean management-fee breakout to support importing that premium with confidence. We have the opposite problem: total revenue up 44% in 2025 while operating income declines 5.6%. That gap should make an analyst more conservative, not less, about assigning a premium multiple based on normalized fee earnings that are not visible here. I do agree with his point that the real risk is fundraising velocity and fee compression in private credit rather than some near-term insider or impairment scare. But I’d state it more bluntly: if private credit becomes even modestly more competitive, a business already showing only 15.9% operating margin on $5.60B of revenue has very little valuation support at 7.2x EV/revenue and 28.0x EV/EBITDA. In other words, the thesis is not merely “the narrative may fade”; it is “the present valuation leaves no room for ordinary industry pressure.”
A careful skeptic of both my view and Opus’s would say we are over-penalizing Ares for GAAP noise and balance-sheet optics that are common in the space, while ignoring that $3.27B of operating cash flow and a 3.9% dividend yield may better represent owner economics than a 74x P/E suggests. They would add that if the missing Q1 2026 revenue data masks another strong fee quarter, today’s multiple on normalized distributable earnings could be much lower than it appears. That is fair. But based on the numbers actually in front of us, the burden of proof belongs to the bull, not the skeptic.
Grok Reading
grok-critique step) alongside the other Big-3 seats, when a
report is run on this ticker.
Advanced Analysis Forensic deep-dive · separate lenses
Ares is a scaled alternative asset manager showing genuine top-line strength — revenue $5.60B in the latest year vs $4.76B four years prior, and FCF has swung decisively positive to $3.27B from deeply negative prints in 2021-2022. Operating margin is volatile (28% to 44% to 16%) which for an alt manager typically reflects performance/carry timing and investment-company consolidation accounting rather than underlying deterioration in the fee business. The franchise itself — permanent-capital-heavy credit and real assets platform — is durable and cash-generative.
Verify before trusting this (5)
- How much of consolidated debt and OCF/NI distortion is attributable to consolidated funds/CLOs vs HoldCo — check 10-K segment/HoldCo-only financials.
- Fee-related earnings (FRE) and fee-paying AUM growth trajectory — the real quality metric for an alt manager, not GAAP OpM.
- Source of the 2024-to-2025 diluted share jump from 227M to 310M — was there an equity raise, GCP acquisition consideration, or AOG unit conversion?
- Realized vs unrealized carried interest composition of net income — determines earnings quality more than accruals ratio.
- Management fee mix and permanent-capital percentage of AUM — durability check.
The e2e work triangulates a deserved price in the $41 (EPV floor) to $85 (anchored PE) range, with a composite around $75 and a signal-adjusted $68 - roughly 40-46% below the $126.51 tape. Even giving full credit to the quality of the franchise (secular alts tailwind, sticky fee streams, scale moat), you have to reach well past the anchored-PE line to justify today's price, which implies the market is capitalizing near-perfect AUM growth, fee stability through a credit cycle, and no cost from the 13%/yr share issuance. That is the definition of priced-for-perfection. The earnings-quality haircut (poor, -2) and the aggressive dilution flagged by the quality lens argue for a LOWER deserved multiple, not a higher one - the per-share compounding story is materially weaker than the AUM story. I discount the $41 EPV floor as too punitive for a fee-based compounder, but I also discount any bull case that leans on the fair-value being wrong; three independent methods all land below $90. Gap is real, but alt-managers routinely trade above intrinsic on narrative, so I am cautious calling this a short - it is simply not a buy here.
Verify before trusting this (5)
- Fee-related earnings vs GAAP net income reconciliation to size the earnings-quality haircut properly
- Fee-earning AUM growth guidance and management fee rate trajectory
- Share count growth guidance - is 13%/yr the run-rate or a one-off from acquisitions
- Sensitivity of anchored-PE fair value to a normalized (lower) fee-related earnings multiple
- Realized carry vs unrealized - how much of reported earnings is durable cash
ARES sits in a tug-of-war. The dominant narrative - a platform-monopoly toll-taker on the secular rotation into private credit and alternatives - is strong and durable enough to keep sponsor bids underneath the stock, and the Batibig financing headline reinforces the 'Ares is everywhere in private credit' story that the cult buys into. Recent momentum is real (up 44% vs a 6% long-term CAGR), and leverage coming down (D/E 8.3 to 3.3) supports the quality-compounder framing that this crowd rewards with a premium multiple.
Verify before trusting this (4)
- Q2 2026 earnings tone next week - fee-related earnings and fundraising pace vs consensus
- Any private-credit stress or default headline that cracks the platform-monopoly story
- Analyst target revisions post-print - whether Hold ratings spread or flip to Buy
- VIX behavior and 10y direction - a rates spike is the fastest way to compress alt-manager multiples
This lens hasn't been run for this ticker yet.
When we made this prediction on Jul 27, 2026, ARES was $126.51. We expect it to be $104.00 by Jan 2027, and we consider it great value under $85.00. This is an early model (v0.6.0) — the direction is more reliable than the exact price. Made Jul 27, 2026.
Blue is our prediction, starting the day we made it. Grey is a slower route to the same place — the same destination, taking longer. Black is the actual price, so you can see how we are doing.