Hey, good afternoon everybody or almost afternoon to those of us in the U. S. And well into the afternoon for those over in the U. K. And Europe.
I'm Jeremy Campbell. I cover the exchanges brokers and asset managers at Barclays. Joining me today is Aerie's CEO, Mike Arougheti and CFO, Mike McFerrin. Mike and Mike, thanks so much for being here at the virtual rendition of the Barclays America Select Conference. Hopefully, we'll be sitting on stage in person next year.
Look forward to that.
Mike Arougheti, maybe there's probably some investors here in the audience today that are new to Ares or maybe even new to the alternative asset manager subsector in general. So maybe it's just worth taking a few moments to do a quick intro in Ares, what you guys do and maybe how you're different from some public peers out there?
Sure. Happy to. Hi, everybody. Mike Arougheti, CEO of Ares. Thanks for the time today.
So Ares was founded in 1997. We have been growing our business behind a long term secular growth trend in alternative asset management. And as we sit here today, we manage in excess of $200,000,000,000 on behalf of close to 1200 institutional investors across the globe and hundreds of thousands of retail investors through some of our core products. I think we've been fortunate that the company has been growing at a compound annual growth rate close to 20% since our founding. And I think that's a combination of consistent investment performance on behalf of our investors and getting rewarded with incremental assets to manage.
And as I mentioned, just a big tailwind in the market as institutional and retail investors alike are looking for alternative investment product and yield, particularly given the secular decline in rates over the last 25 or 30 years. If you look at that $200,000,000,000 plus of AUM, we cover the waterfront of alternative products from credit through to private equity and real assets. And what we have learned over the years is that those businesses operating at scale can drive some pretty interesting competitive advantages around how we source product, how we invest in product and drive information advantages and the big relationship networks that we can build with our investors and our investee clients as we continue to build the business. You asked what differentiates us. Probably the biggest differentiator is the percentage of our assets that are in the global private credit markets.
So if you look at that $207,000,000,000 of AUM at the end of Q1, about $150,000,000,000 of it is in the credit markets. And the reason that's important is those markets continue to grow and scale and globalize. And we've been doing it for a very long time and we think that we've created a pretty meaningful mode around that business in terms of our relationship networks, the type of capital that we manage in those markets and the long track record performance through cycles. Maybe we'll touch on some of this a little bit later, but what that does for us is it actually sets up the financial positioning of the company in a pretty different way differentiated way relative to some of our PE centric peers in the public and private market. So because of the focus on credit, we have less volatility in our revenue and earnings stream.
We have more predictability, therefore, as reflected in our growing dividend, which we can talk about a little bit later. And because of the focus on credit, you'll see a high management fee percentage of revenue and a high management fee contribution to earnings. There are some unique attributes as well in terms of how we get paid on those assets and what it means in terms of the forward visibility of our earnings going forward. And then 2, I think is really just how integrated we are from a cultural standpoint. I think we've been fortunate having grown up together as partners over the last 20 plus years, the collaboration across our platform, across geographies and asset classes in different parts of the business is key to how we leverage some of those competitive advantages that I talked about earlier.
So hopefully we can drill down on summer all of that. But again, thanks for having us today.
Yes, that's a great way to set the table for the conversation, Mike. Appreciate it. So let's just talk about fundraising
for a
couple of minutes here because I think it's at the front of mind for a lot of investors out there. Last year, you guys raised a record $40,000,000,000 of new capital, which in of itself was pretty impressive. But then with your ongoing fundraising and managed accounts, permanent capital vehicles, CLOs and other funds, I think you guys mentioned that you expect to meet or exceed that level again in 'twenty one. So I think to date, you've already raised over $10,000,000,000 in 1Q, including final closes and funds like your illiquid alternative credit funds, real estate opportunity funds. Just want to think about further fundraising in these areas, maybe unpack a couple of other areas maybe that you're excited about that will help you reach that target in 'twenty one?
Sure. I'll take us out and then Mike, if you have anything to add. So as I mentioned, folks need to appreciate that the alternative asset space is growing globally and it's growing because whether you're a pension fund, an insurance company, a retiree, you are struggling to meet your return objectives in this rate environment. And so you're either frustrated with the returns that you're generating in your core fixed income allocations or you're frustrated by the valuations and high volatility in the global equity markets. So generally speaking, if you look across the product set for alternatives, you'll see that the index is growing somewhere between 10% 15%.
What doesn't show there, but it's been our experience and I think the experience of some of our large peers is that the larger platforms are capturing a disproportionate share of that growth. So while the market is growing 10% to 15%, as you've seen in our most recent LTM performance, we're growing 30% plus in terms of our AUM trajectory. And the reason we're capturing that disproportionate share is because of these benefits of scale that I talked about earlier in terms of origination advantages and the ability to deploy more actively in different market environments. So 2020 was obviously a pretty significant growth year, but it was already trending up. We had a prior record year in 2018 at $36,000,000,000 So the floor is raising in terms of where the baseline for us is.
And that's a function of the number of strategies that we manage. So the diversity is creating a new floor, but it's also a function of just consistent performance leading to larger successor funds. One thing that is important to understand too is that at least in the institutional market and I think this will happen in the retail market, people are consolidating their wallet share with fewer brands. In the retail markets, as we continue to take share of retail, I think you're going to begin to see flows going to the larger brands as well. And so that trend should persist.
We have a lot of visibility into the fundraising pipeline ahead of us. Obviously, 2020 was a great year. We closed out, as you mentioned, a number of flagship fund products in the Q1 and are already in the market with successor funds in our U. S. Direct lending business with a junior capital fund and a senior debt fund.
We are in the market with a flagship private equity strategy and so on and so forth. And then in the back half of the year, expect to bring successor funds in our opportunistic credit business and our Asia distressed business. So if you go back 20 years to the founding of the firm, we probably would have 1 or 2 funds in the market at any point in time. Today, we're raising 12 to 15 commingled funds per year and those funds are getting larger. And that's really what's driving the growth in fundraising.
Obviously, we need to support that growth with investments in fundraising, infrastructure, salespeople, investor relations folks, systems and all of the above. But with that support, we're able to meet the demand of the investment community. The other thing I would highlight is we raise a lot of money outside of traditional institutional channels. So a lot of our fundraising is coming from our public managed funds like ARCC, our publicly traded BDC, open ended institutional fund product, non traded interval funds, CLOs. And again, as the business has grown, we're now seeing that we're raising $15,000,000,000 plus away from that core commingled fund franchise.
So when you put that $40,000,000,000 in that context, it's roughly $15,000,000,000 non institutional and $25,000,000,000 institutional, both of which are growing.
Yes. And then I guess maybe just to pack to hop on top of that one, you've talked about successor funds and the success you guys have had there. You talked about some of the alternative structures outside of funds. What about newer strategies? How should investors think about the broadening of the Ares portfolio and going forward and what that means for fundraising as well?
Yes, it's a great question. And I think both fundraising and just business building, it's always going to be a combination of organic and inorganic growth. As we're getting larger and as our access to capital is getting more efficient, we're able to launch adjacent strategies that sit next to one of our core competencies and then can become something new and scalable in and of itself. So 2 really, really good recent examples of that are what we were able to do in our special opportunities part of our business, which is effectively opportunistic credit within our private equity group and our alternative credit business. And if you look at both of those, starting in about 2018, we staffed up a team of close to 20 people prior to raising capital behind an idea that we can leverage our direct lending capability and our private equity capability to do something really differentiated in the private distressed markets.
It took 12 to 18 months to organize the team and launch that first fund. And we put a fairly conservative number on the cover of that fund at $2,000,000,000 And we wound up closing that fund at a hard cap of $3,600,000,000 dollars Obviously invested it well through COVID. And one of the funds I referenced that we'll be bringing back into the market at the second half of this year is the 2nd vintage for that new fund family a year plus earlier than we probably expected. So perfect example of how we are able to take existing capability and capital relationships, put people behind it and then launch a pretty sizable fund family. Almost identical story in our alternative credit business where again we invested heavily in a team broadened out our capabilities went to raise a $2,000,000,000 fund and then ultimately raised in excess of $3,500,000,000 and we're able to invest that through the pandemic.
Worth mentioning and I don't want to take us too far off track though is back to the structure of our company and how it translates into the P and L and the dividend. In both of those examples, we're able to invest in growth in a way we're actually effectively constraining our margin expansion and profitability to invest in future growth. So we often get asked about how we think about balancing growth and margin expansion, but clearly carrying that amount of headcount in advance of flagship fundraise is short term dilutive to earnings and margin, but long term accretive to our profitability and ultimately our FRE trajectory.
And we'll tag McFerran in here a little while to talk about the margins and the slingshot effect of what that might mean to go forward. But I think maybe just kind of sticking on the fundraising side, we talked about strategies a little bit. Let's talk a little bit more about channels and opportunities there. So and Mike, you had mentioned a little bit earlier retail. Retail investors getting more involved in our alternatives.
It's been a goal for a couple quite a while now. You have the BDC and the public offering that way. Do you feel you have sufficient retail offerings? Or is there anything to consider here from a white space perspective that would kind of broaden your accessibility to the spectrum of retail investors?
Yes, I think we continue to invest behind our retail product offering. You mentioned the BDC. I think the good news is given the track record and longevity of that entity, we've developed a very good brand in the retail channel. We similarly touched the retail investor through our closed end credit fund complex, through our listed mortgage REIT. We have a non traded interval fund that invests across our credit spectrum.
So what we have found is we've been able to leverage the brand that we created in that traditional 40 Act product into other channels of opportunity with retail. So I think we're just getting started, but some of the things that we are working on folks may have seen we entered into a joint venture with Challenger Fidante to issue retail product in the Australia and New Zealand market that is getting traction. We are continuing with the build of our affiliated insurance and annuities platform. That's an indirect way to deliver an alternative asset product to a retail investor. And we're continuing to leverage the relationships that we have with the wires and the broker dealer community to start thinking about new product to bring into that channel.
So we're very bullish on the opportunity to bring alternative assets into the retail channel. We think we have a really good head start, but I think we're just getting started.
And then if we think about globally in the different regions that you guys are focused in on, I know obviously Asia Pac has been a focus lately with the acquisition of SLG last year and then a lot of headlines related to another thing that we probably don't need to dig in too deep into. But maybe just can you give us an update around how SSG is integrating so far and how you're looking to expand maybe even further within Asia Pac or other global regions?
Sure. Happy to report that the integration of SSG could not have gone better. We're coming up on the 1 year anniversary of the closing of the acquisition and call it the 2 year anniversary of the beginning of our conversations with them and kind of the integration planning. And it has gone as well as an integration could go both from a cultural standpoint, but also from an operational and investment standpoint. We acquired the platform at a time when it already had a lot of momentum, both in terms of its fundraising and its investment activities as well as its IRR and that's continued.
So one of the funds that we are in the market with which we've talked about is our Asia direct lending fund off the Ares SSG SSG platform. That's going very well and we expect to meet its target. And then in the back half of this year, we would expect to bring the next vintage of our Asia distressed credit product off of that platform. So the core business is going extremely well. What we hoped to see on the tail end of that acquisition was that with that large beachhead in the region that we would be able to create new product off of the existing core private credit business, but then begin to think about how we leverage the platform into the real assets and private equity part of the business.
And that is now happening. So we're pretty far along in new product development in specific regions and specific asset classes that will continue to grow that business. So very, very happy with where it is. And so much of what we talk about on the M and A front is just making sure that you get that sweet spot of cultural alignment, financial alignment and strategic alignment. And you always have conviction going in, but you never know until you're through it.
But a year out, it's exactly what we hoped it would be.
And when you start making forays into these new markets like this, especially in a more acquisitive manner, I mean, we'll talk about M and A in a little bit here. But I guess maybe what's from a value add perspective, do you obviously there's kind of good products, you have invested professionals with more localized knowledge, but you're also expanding your network of LPs in these geographies. I guess as you kind of think down the checklist of things and as you mentioned earlier, making sure that culture is a really good fit is always important thing. How do we kind of prioritize what's important from a further expansionary capability perspective?
Yes, it's a great question and I'm going to try to oversimplify the answer a little bit. But the way that we've always said is, let's have a simple filter. It's got to be culturally accretive, financially accretive and strategically accretive. Within that kind of 3 pronged filter, we have to have a very strong view that we can make the acquired company better by bringing capital or capability or some kind of information advantage to them, but also that they're going to bring something unique to us that we can't do on our own. So, so much of that buy versus build conversation that we have back to the SOF and alternative credit is, if we can birth something organically, we're going to do it, right?
It's less risky, more accretive. We know that the culture is there. So when we're making an acquisition, they have to bring something that is truly unique. And typically, we're going to do it in a market or a geography where we think scale and speed to market are important. So we did have a sense of urgency around getting scaled in Asia Pac.
We felt that it was important given how those markets were developing that we would do it through an acquisition. And so that led us to SSG. So when we're making acquisitions, it's going to be with a very specific view that they're going to bring something unique to us and that there's going to be a 2 way value add.
Great. And then, I guess, let's transition over deployment for a moment here. I think it's worth noting that deployment is probably a little bit more important for your business model than some of your peers out there, as a lot of the management fee stream starts turning on once you guys invest the capital as opposed to capital committed fundraising. Like you see a lot more skewed to some of the other kind of public entities out there. It's also been elevated.
Again, you invested over $10,000,000,000 in the Q1 and that's like a hair less than the Q4 of last year. Given market conditions, what do you think the credit landscape will look like over the next 6 to 12 months? And do you anticipate deployment to remain elevated over the course of the year?
Yes, I'll give you my view. And then, Mike, you can talk maybe a little bit about how deployment drives the profitability of the company. I think it is one of those unique attributes. But I wouldn't say that it's elevated, Jeremy. I think it's important that when you think about deployment, I think about it as a percentage of our available capital and a reflection of our capital base and our people as much as just kind of an absolute number because again, we're operating in very large addressable global markets.
And while we have market leadership positions, our market share is still fairly small, right? So there's a lot of room to scale into those markets as we add capability, people and capital. So as you would expect, as all of those improve, you're going to see increased deployment. Q1 was a strong deployment quarter, to your point on the heels of a strong Q4. I think that's a reflection generally of a recovery mindset in the markets on the heels of the pandemic.
We're actually seeing transaction volumes accelerate now as people are focusing more on the recovery taking route. And at least in the U. S. Market, you're seeing a fair amount of transaction activity trying to get out ahead of any potential changes in cap gains taxes. So we've talked about this publicly, even our BDC and mortgage rate have said the same.
For the foreseeable future, call that 12 months plus, I think we're going to be in a pretty attractive deployment environment. You've got that sweet spot of liquidity in the markets driving transaction volume, low default rates, low losses and then accelerated transaction volume. So Q1 being a seasonally slow quarter, I think demonstrated the kind of trajectory that we can expect for the back half of the year. Mike, is that potentially kind of how that
Let's talk a little bit about the lifecycle of how this plays out from an economic perspective, Jeremy. What to Mike's point about the credit orientation of our business and most of our capital pace is often invested, what you see is kind of this consistent upward sloping linear growth of revenue and then in turn fee related earnings. And what's great about this for us is stepping back for a second. If you look at how we earn management fees, most of our management fees are coming from either permanent capital or long dated closed end funds. So knowing that, we're operating with what we'll call a very stable, insulated, durable base of revenue that's, for the most part, pretty much not really disruptable because we're not subject to redemption risk or market value declines doesn't most of our capital is insulated from what you call traded asset market values.
So when you think about our revenue model, because it's so insulated, it's able to continuously effectively grow without having headwinds of your onboarded ex capital, but you had a whole bunch of redemptions if you were running a lot of hot money, which we built. And then if you then looking forward, adding to that is you've got this meaningful amount of AUM that's already been raised, so it's already under the tent. And every day that it gets deployed, it adds incremental management fees. So we end the Q1 with about $396,000,000 of potential management fees tied to that AUM. And to put that in context, that's over 30% of our last 12 months management fees.
So not an inconsequential number. In the past, we've said people should generally expect an average deployment per time horizon for that of 18 to 24 months. And as what you see as we continue fundraising, which you and I talked about a moment ago, you're seeing dollars going out, management fees coming online, that those dollars getting replenished through the incremental fundraising and then the life cycle keeps churning. And I know you wanted to talk about margin later. But with that, you have effectively so much of those management fees are coming online with the strategies where the expenses are already embedded in the business.
So they're coming on at a much higher margin than you would operate at in past periods. And that's why you're also seeing similar to that kind of linear upward sloping growth of revenue, the fee related earnings you're seeing with the FRE margin as well. And those 3 are working together like that. So it's nice kind of tying this all together. For our business, when we look out over the next couple of years, you have so much growth built in already to what you've already raised.
And then it's just a function of employment. And then to what Mike was describing earlier, so much of what we're doing today as far as investments for the future aren't about driving revenue growth for 2022 and 2023, that's really about driving continued long term growth for Ares 2025 and beyond.
And Mike McFerrin, I think one of the things that you guys do in your slide deck is every quarter you kind of show that dry powder that you mentioned and the I think you guys called it out last time, you just mentioned it here, almost $400,000,000 of fee revenue would be turned on if it gets deployed. I think the really interesting aspect though, and it kind of dovetails with the fundraising piece we just talked about is that, that dry powder number of AUM hasn't really gone down. So you're adding more to that top of the funnel, even though your deployments and your investing is kind of coming out of the bottom of funnel. So, I think that kind of subscribes to the fact that the growth that you had mentioned that you're expecting in the business going forward.
Yes, Jeremy, one quick overlay to that, because I think it's important because it does speak to that core theme of the differentiation of the credit platform. In the traditional PE world, you would raise a large fund, deploy it, raise another one when you raise the successor fund, fees step down in your prior funds and then you start harvesting, which obviously generates incentive income, but drives your management fee down. In credit land, we get paid on deployed, but importantly, we don't actually have fee step downs and you don't actively harvest. So with each successor fund, you're seeing that linear growth and you're not actually giving it back. And that's a big driver of the consistency of the growth trajectory here.
The other nuance, which I think people will begin to appreciate, maybe not this year, but the next year and the year after is as these credit funds, which typically have a European waterfall, meaning we get our incentive fees at the end of life, As some of these large flagship credit funds mature, the promotes just start getting harvested almost quarterly as those portfolios monetize. So we're heading towards an environment where on top of that consistent growth trajectory from deployment, you're actually going to start to see a pretty consistent performance fee kick in as some of these credit funds are actually maturing just based on the structure of those promotes, which is a pretty I don't think that the market's really seen that yet.
And Mike, I think it's funny because I think you mentioned earlier today, I think a lot of the peers have mentioned on their various calls, like we're I think a couple of days off of being Top Gun Day, but it feels like a very target rich environment for deployments. And the old rule of thumb, at least in the non credit world, but it kind of holds a little bit for credit too is you go start raising successor funds once you're about half ish invested in the predecessor fund. So is there a scenario in your mind where if 'twenty one remains a robust and target rich environment that there might be a little bit of a pull forward in fundraising for successor funds. I think you already mentioned one of them in your earlier comments here, but just kind of curious to hear your thoughts about that more holistically.
Yes, it's altogether possible. Again, I think in the world of credit, it's much more important that you raise the right amount of capital against the addressable market opportunity as it is to raise the largest fund that you can. So, so much of what we do prior to any fund launch is really looking at the deployment historically, the people that we have against the strategy and what we think a realistic fund size is. And we would much rather raise a smaller fund relative to maxing it out, invest it well and then come back. Because again, from a profit generating standpoint, we're getting paid on deployment, not on commitment.
So it's in our interest and our LPs interest just to get that fund size right. Not to say that we don't want to grow our funds, but we don't have to stretch. So what that means is we are typically coming back to market quicker than I think the market was conditioned to expect. And you can see that across the platform. So I mentioned our special opportunities fund.
We're coming back 2.5 years after we closed the first one. In our Asia distressed fund, we had a final close Q4 of 2019. We're coming back 2 years in. So that 2 to 3 year rhythm is proving out to be the rule rather than the exception. And obviously deployment is going to accelerate that to the extent that we're in the environment that we hope we are.
And
Mike McFerran, let's unpack expenses and Martin a little bit here. And I think your commentary a couple of moments ago was very useful around turning on that new revenue stream without really any attached expenses to it once that dry powder is deployed. I guess from a higher level perspective, you guys have invested quite a bit in your business over the past number of years here. So from a cost growth perspective, are there how do we think about the incremental margins might be flowing through and how much might be redirected toward other type of growth initiatives that you guys are planning for at this point?
So let's start with the existing business. We've captured a lot of operational efficiencies from past investments. We've invested a lot in technology, which we're reaping the benefits of. We opened our Mumbai office, which is where our operating center of excellence in August 2019, which has given us great operating leverage. And frankly, we have a team that runs an efficient business.
I mean, we're in this industry, historically, when firms were smaller, you probably didn't pay a lot of attention to what you paid for copiers or office plays or those things because they just didn't seem to move the needle. But as Ares has grown and evolved, we have teams that are great to also work with our portfolio companies on really great discipline on expense management. And you're seeing that through what I would call If you look at our really exceptional growth in recent years, G and A growth has been very restrained, running under 10% a year with but the FRE has been running towards the 20% a year. So I think that's a testament to how we're running the business. But the nice thing and Mike touched upon this already, we're not doing that as a sacrifice to investing tomorrow.
And I again, I don't know we our peers aren't technically biotech or R and D considered firms. So we're not disclosing how much of our revenue is going back into the future. But I have to believe it's among the top as a percentage of our overall revenue in the industry. But I think that's worthwhile in the sense that you've seen our growth be industry leading now for so many years. And it's part of that life cycle we're putting capital back in.
So a decent amount of the margin gets reinvested for tomorrow. But we're running a business that operates today for 38% margin based on Q1. That was a 500 basis point expansion from a year earlier. You've seen a consistent, really meaningful 200 to 300 basis point expansion in margin each year in recent years. And based on the amount of dry powder going back to that almost $400,000,000 of AUMI entering fees, I think the line of sight for continued margin expansion is pretty meaningful.
But again, not at the sacrifice of investing for future growth for Ares.
And we get this question a lot. So I just wanted to unpack this here. I mean, if we were to snap our fingers and think of Ares in a world where the space is much more mature, right? There's nothing structural that would inhibit your FRE margin relative to other peers out there. Would it?
Not at all. Not at all. Look, we're I don't know at the point where you say you're running a business north of 50% margin or what have you, where you would say are you having obviously asked yourself, are you investing enough tomorrow? I think I don't we can't imagine being in a place where to your point of maturity, the industry has reached maturity or Ares reached maturity.
You think of it as kind of a
steady state because we haven't been through the volatility of the financial crisis, obviously, the events of the last couple of years of our 20 year history across market cycles, growth in our business and in the overall alternative sector has been significant and it seems to be accelerating. So but there's again, there's no limiter or fixed ceiling formula that would prevent margin somehow margins going to keep going much further.
Got it. That makes sense.
And then maybe just spend a couple more moments here on investing in the business. Obviously, spent a lot of time on direct lending, but primarily successful in North America and Europe. We mentioned earlier, I think you just had the European Fund closed with over, I think, €11,000,000,000 in LP Capital, I think, going up to €15,000,000,000 is what you guys mentioned with some leverage on there. As you continue to execute these transactions and capture increased share, do you say the most valuable thing you've learned in building out these origination relationships is?
It's a great, great question because it's one of those intangibles that is so key to the value proposition of the business. But I always describe it this way. A lot of people look at private credit and think that it's easy because if you're making an 8% return, how hard can it be? And I take issue with that. It's actually quite hard because if you think about most private credit assets, the way that they're structured, if you're right, what you have to be almost 100% of the time, you get your coupon.
And if you're wrong, you lose all your money. So asset selectivity, credit selection is so key and to do it at scale is actually quite challenging. But you're asking I think the most important question because if we pose the question to our people, which we have in various strategic planning sessions, what's more important, origination or credit, you would probably get fifty-fifty because they're so inextricably linked. And the reason for that is at the end of the day, we say no 95% of the time. So if we have a good client who's a Tier 1 client that we've been doing business with for 30 years, they're going to show us all of their deal flow and we're going to say yes less than 5% of the time.
That is a very difficult proposition. So how do you create enduring relationships with your clients when you're turning them down almost every time they pick up the phone and call you, right? So the way you do it is when you say yes, you execute flawlessly, both in terms of the speed, the creativity, the flexibility, the partnership, the collaboration. And if you do that enough times, and you aggregate that 5% yes across 100 and 100 of people in relationships, what emerges is a really, really sticky time tested set of relationships. It's very difficult to replicate.
And to Mike's comment now, it's also very difficult to replicate through cycles. So when you've been through 3 cycles with somebody and you've made money together and you've lost money together that's worth a lot. And so without going into too much more it is the secret sauce of the business across everything that we do. It's those enduring relationships. But how you build them and how you cement them is really just a function of time and execution, which is why I think
And maybe this kind of dovetails on Mike McCurran's earlier comment about steady state and mature markets and how that's relatively impossible to think about. But you guys have a market leading origination platform here. Is there any I mean is there any conceptual kind of cap as to how large this can get? Or is it just because the market in aggregate, the opportunity is so large and keeps growing that you guys have a lot of room to keep accelerating here?
Yes, there's a theoretical cap. I just don't know where it is because the market itself is growing organically. So if you just say what is the middle market economy compounding at, that's a healthy number. If you look at structural changes in the capital markets, whether it's the high yield market, the leveraged loan market, the global securitization ecosystem, all of that is changing too and it's moving to scale, which means that the opportunity for institutional credit providers like ourselves is expanding as we're taking share from kind of the lower end of those traded markets. Private capital is generally speaking taking share from public markets.
So private equity is starting to take share from public equity. So as that ecosystem develops, there's more demand for private credit solutions. And then back to the Asia conversation, this mark the market's globalizing. So each of these markets is in different phase of evolution. Obviously, the U.
S. Market is more mature and developed in Europe, Asia or eventually Africa, Latin America, etcetera. But I think there's still a lot of room to grow. And as I mentioned, as a market leader, we probably have less than a 5% market share. So typically when you see businesses like ours, market leaders tend to have market shares that are 3, 4, 5 times that.
Not to say that we'll be able to get there just based on our own risk appetite, but there's clearly a lot of white space in the markets for the foreseeable future.
And with our last couple of minutes here, guys, I just wanted to wrap it up. I think we've traveled a lot of ground here today in this conversation so far, but we just want to wrap it up with a high level look at the space. Obviously, we're in a much different world right now than we were a year ago when we were chatting back then. Just want to get your thoughts on the state of the market and where you guys see the most exciting opportunities either we talked about fundraising deployment, we talked a little bit about M and A and if anything else that you guys wanted to impart investors with as we kind of shut it down here in a couple of minutes would be great.
Yes, I'll make a couple of general comments. I guess you have to be careful what you wish for, right? Because as an American, as a father, when we were speaking a year ago, I think we're all saying, God, let's just have it be better. I don't think that any of us expected that we would see this level of snapback and liquidity in the market. And so we got what we wished for, which is now we have stability progress on the health front and a move to recovery.
But what that means for the markets, particularly the liquid markets is there's a lot of capital. Rates are still persistently low. That's obviously showing up in high valuations. And so yes, it's funny because I guess as a credit person, I'm never really happy. We're in a really nice spot right now in the sense that transaction volumes are up.
The markets are liquid. Credit performance and equity performance as you saw from our Q1 results are doing extremely well. So we are in a really, really good spot right now. But telling everybody what they know, there's a lot of capital in the markets and you have particularly in the liquid equity and debt markets, you have a lot of capital squeezing return out of those asset classes. So for us being in the private markets is a real blessing in the sense that we're able to move around and either because of a capital constraint in the market or an inefficiency, we're still able to generate meaningful excess return relative to the liquid market equivalent, which is what our investors pay us for.
And we're not forced to be in the market, right? So the beauty of being an alt manager is if someone gives us a dollar, we don't have to invest it. If I were a high yield mutual fund manager and someone gave me a dollar, I would have put it in the market even if I didn't think that was the right thing to do. So actually a lot of the alpha that we generate is from not being invested or avoiding certain industries or avoiding certain sectors. So it's almost as much about what we don't do than what we do do.
And I think given what is in front of us, it's a good time to be in the private markets. I think being in the liquid markets right now is a little bit tougher. So while we have liquid credit markets that are obviously a big part of our credit franchise, I would say generally speaking, all things private credit right now are standing out as significant excess return relative to whatever that public market equivalent is.
Perfect. Well, Mike, thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it and look forward to the fall. Hope to see you at the September conference
and then
maybe in London next year.
Perfect. We look forward to it. Thanks everybody for the time. Thanks for having us, Jeremy. Bye, everyone.