Everyone, and thank you for joining Bank of America's 33rd annual financial services conference. This is Craig Siegenthaler, North American Head of Diversified Financials, and I'm very pleased to introduce Michael Arougheti of Ares. Michael is the CEO, Co-Founder, and also Director on the board. Mike, thank you for joining us in Miami.
Always great to be here. Thanks.
We got a packed house today. Just a little bit on background, Ares is one of the largest alternative asset managers in the world, with a world-class business, especially including their number one private credit franchise. The company's been generating one of the fastest growth rates in the industry. Five years ago, the firm managed a little over $100 billion of AUM. Now that number's almost $500 billion. Ares is also one of the more defensive alt managers, given its credit-heavy business and management fee-rich profit streams. With that, Mike, let's get started.
I was going to say, thank you very much for coming, everybody. You kind of covered most of everything.
We'll save a few good things for here. We've entered year three of the bull market. IPOs are expected to accelerate. That'll help origination activities. Spreads are tight, but dry powder and aging invested capital needs also have to move. My question is, what are you expecting for deployments in 2025? Across the Ares global franchise, what asset classes do you expect to see the most upside in?
Sure. Just a quick aside. If you look at, you said we're in year three of the bull market. If you take COVID out, we're probably later in the cycle than maybe everybody thinks we are. And it's just something to keep in the back of our minds. We could touch on that a little bit later. But look, I think the good news about the product set and global capability we have now is that we have demonstrated over the last number of years that we can deploy across the platform, regardless of the transaction environment. And a lot of that has to do with what Craig referenced in terms of the structure of the private markets that we invest in.
I think if you go back to prior cycles, the private market capital deployment was largely dependent on a robust M&A transaction environment in order to drive deployment. We find ourselves now in a situation where there's more capital that has been invested than is available to invest. And just to put that in perspective, in one corner of the market, if you look at private equity, there's about $3.5 trillion of capital that is in the ground in private equity portfolios. It's roughly 30,000 companies owned by buyout firms. 60% of those assets are now aged over four years, and 25%-30% are aged over six years. Those companies need to get resolved in some way in order to return capital to the investors that they then will put money back into the market. There's about $1.2 trillion uninvested dry powder.
If you go back to the GFC, it was roughly one to one. The numbers were obviously lower, about $0.5 trillion each. So the challenge that the market's facing right now, particularly as rates stay persistently high, is if M&A doesn't pick up, how do I actually get the velocity of capital moving again? So what we have found, and if you look at our deployment last year, we deployed a little over $100 billion across the platform, which was meaningfully up from prior and was a new record. But a lot of it was in what we would call generally solutions, secondaries, LP-led secondaries, GP-led secondaries, opportunistic credit, anything that was able to bring capital into an owned asset in a non-dilutive way that then would free up capital to either return to investors or to grow.
So as we sit here today, I think everybody post-election was looking into 2025 with a high degree of optimism and enthusiasm for renewed transaction activity, lighter regulation, pro-business sentiment. I think now the markets are digesting the economic realities of tariff policy, persistent inflation, changes to the labor market. And so that's changing the mood a little bit. And I think we're just going to have to see how things play out. I will tell you, through January, the private pipelines that we see have been quite strong. As a publicly announced example, in our BDC's earnings call last week, they talked about $1.2 billion of deployment against a $1.8 billion backlog, which was significantly higher, probably 70% higher than prior year. So there are indicators that the animal spirits are, in fact, moving and that people want to transact, but there's headwinds.
Those headwinds may slow some of that enthusiasm. If that happens, then we'll go back to doing what we've been doing for the last couple of years, which is be a liquidity provider, up the balance sheet to these institutional owners of assets in a way that we think is going to be just as good. I am optimistic we're going to get a lot of new M&A. We're seeing that in the broadly syndicated loan market. If we don't, I think vis-à-vis the positioning of the company, we're still going to have a really good deployment year.
So switching over to the fundraising side, credit returns have been great. Base rates went higher, spreads were higher. Now spreads came down a little bit. Base rates came down a little bit. Credit returns are still very, very good relative to history. But last year was the first year we saw some of the equity products outperform credit. Now, this may not be a zero-sum game, but do you expect to see momentum flow back into some of the equity products, private equity, infrastructure equity, maybe even eventually real estate equity, which is a lot more relevant for you after this acquisition?
Yeah.
From credit, or do you think the TAMs are so big everything kind of win at the same time?
I think usually everything can win at the same time, but this dynamic I described has meaningfully constrained dollars in the private equity market. So everyone talks about the slowing down of the private equity fundraising cycle because the GP community is just not returning enough capital to then get the capital back. And that has been a meaningful headwind in private equity for the last two and a half or three years. So you do need to see velocity of capital pickup in private equity if you want to see the private equity fundraising cycle pick up too. Real estate is definitely beginning to garner more LP interest. And we're seeing that in the institutional market. We're also seeing it in the wealth channel. The stability in rates started to unfreeze the pipeline.
We did see a pickup in activity in the real estate market, both debt and equity, towards the end of last year and into the beginning of this year. I would caveat that by saying as the markets grapple with the reality that rates will be higher for longer, that could be a headwind to real estate transaction activity. To your point about zero-sum game, it is not a zero-sum game when you're talking about credit and equity. I mean, generally speaking, retail and institutional investors are allocating to the private credit market out of their traditional fixed income allocation, and they are generally allocating to private equity out of their traditional equity exposures, and so it's less about people choosing private equity versus private credit and more choosing private markets exposure versus public markets exposure.
And I think that tailwind is still very much in place because people are able to generate excess return in both parts of the market. I would take issue a little bit with your comment, at least vis-à-vis our performance on credit returns under-delivering or maybe even just under-delivering relative to equity. With base rates where they are now, we actually saw increased interest in private credit because the reality is a lot of these exposures are generating 10%-15% rates of return at 50% of enterprise value. So I just remind everybody when you're talking about credit return, you have to talk about risk-adjusted return and return per unit of risk exposure.
You may have had the private equity index deliver a 15% or 20% against or 12% or 15%, but on a risk-adjusted basis, private credit is still flashing green for a lot of institutions that aren't quite comfortable pricing equity risk premium right now.
Sure. I mean, I was comparing top of the capital stack to bottom of the capital stack, and so those returns should be very different. Long-term growth. I want to know what your main priorities for growth are just this year, and then how does that fit into those five-year growth targets that you just gave us at the investor day last year?
Yeah. So just to level set everybody, we had our investor day last year. We put out effectively five-year guidance ex-acquisition, where we articulated a view that we would be able to grow our FRE 16%-20%, that we would be able to grow our RI 20%+ , and that our dividend would be 20%+ . We just announced our dividend forward for 2025, and it was a 20% year-over-year growth. And if you look at our FRE for 2024, it was about a 17% year-over-year growth, so consistent with the guidance that we put out. I do remind people, frankly, how remarkable it is to be able to put out five-year guidance and be within the tolerances that we are. So I do think it speaks to the stability, diversity, and predictability of the cash flow streams that underpin the business.
Look, the good news is if you think about what Ares does in private credit, we have five core private credit businesses in corporate credit. We have real estate credit and infrastructure credit, real estate equity, infrastructure equity, secondaries, a growing insurance and annuities platform. Each of those businesses is generally expected to grow in line with the guidance. It's not as though we have certain markets that are offering above-trend deployment opportunity and others that aren't. But back to my comment about rates and potential headwinds, I think the more you get into regular way equity risk-taking, deployment becomes harder in this market. Bid-ask spreads haven't quite met in the middle. The rate uncertainty, I think, will make it more challenging. But for anything that's kind of middle of the balance sheet up, I think it's going to be a pretty good year.
I wanted to talk about the flagship funds out there. So you don't have to go through all of them, but just kind of simplistically, if you think about the number of flagships you're raising last year versus the number of flagships you're raising this year, will that be more of a tailwind for growth this year?
So we had a record fundraising year last year, about $93 billion. We talked about this on our earnings call. 65% of that capital raising happened outside of what we call our flagships or our commingled campaign funds. So what has been happening over the last, call it, 10+ years, we've been broadening out the product set. We've been globalizing the product set, and then we've been diversifying the distribution away from just traditional institutional campaign funds into wealth, insurance, listed product, CLOs, SMAs, strategic partnerships, open-ended institutional funds. So every year when we turn the page on the calendar, we show up with a much higher floor for fundraising. And so you're going to see much less volatility in Ares than 10 years ago.
So if 65% of that was non-flagship and those end markets like wealth and insurance are growing, that gives you a lot of ballast and growth going into 2025. We did have two of our largest funds have final closes last year, our European Direct Lending Fund and our U.S. Direct Lending Fund, each of which is a little $30 billion+ type fund. Obviously, not all of it closed last year, but that was the big number. In its place, we're going to have 18 other commingled funds that are not $30 billion funds, but are meaningful funds in their own right: opportunistic credit, real estate, sports, media, and entertainment, infrastructure debt. So the one way I try to articulate this for people is we have capacity in our deployment that we need to maximize the value on, and we have capacity in our institutional fundraising.
So by definition, if our institutional relationship managers have been focused on raising $40 billion of equity for a smaller group of funds, when those funds come out, then that capacity gets directed to a broader group of funds. And that's generally been how the business works. So more funds this year than last year, but smaller. But I do continue to believe that you're going to see faster-than-trend growth in insurance and wealth and the other more permanent parts of the business.
Mike, where are you focusing on product innovation today? And what do you consider your main product gaps, especially after this large acquisition?
Yeah. Look, product innovation could be opening up new markets that we feel are ripe for private capital disruption. Two examples of that would be sports, media, and entertainment. Five years ago, when COVID began, we had an idea that we would be able to aggregate all of our personal and professional expertise in sports into an investable business at a time when the sports landscape was going through a pretty meaningful transition due to COVID. We aggregated a pool of capital a little over $4 billion and set out to start changing the way capital flowed into the global sports and media landscape. And we did that, frankly, with great success. And we are now in the market with a product for the wealth channel to give ordinary non-institutional investors access to these types of exposures that they up to this point wouldn't be able to get.
We've been able to then take the institutional relationships there and create an open-ended institutional product because of the duration and nature of those assets. There was innovation there on two fronts. One was we actually think that we created a market that is now a multi-trillion dollar TAM for us on a global basis, and we innovated around institutional open-ended product and wealth. Another example would be in our Asia-Pacific private credit business. We have, I would like to think, one of the market-leading opportunistic and special situations franchises in the region. We are beginning to see the development of the private credit market in APAC along the same lines that we've seen in the U.S. and Europe over the last 20 years.
And so we have begun to build out origination teams and capital to offer the market a broad-based private credit exposure in APAC that includes corporate and real asset exposures. And we think that's pretty innovative. So you're going to be innovating around new markets, and then you're going to just be iterating, frankly, around structures. And I think what's so exciting about the business that we're in now, as these new distribution channels are opening up, there are different wrappers that you get to put on product to offer to the client. But if you do it well, it gives you a differentiated tool to then go deliver something into the actual market that a borrower or a company needs from you.
So I think if you really want to innovate in this business, you have to have a good feedback loop between the investors on the ground in the market who are trying to serve capital partners and your investors and make sure that you're having those two communicate.
So a couple of months ago, you announced a very large acquisition of an international real estate company. We can get to that in a minute, but I wanted you to sort of go through your go-forward objectives for M&A after that deal. I mean, you're going to take some time to focus on integrating this for a year or so and then get back to it. But what's sort of the go-forward plan here?
I can't predict the future, but we have a lot on our plate organically and a lot of growth vectors that got created with this acquisition. For those that didn't see it, we announced the acquisition of a company called GCP International, which is one of the largest industrial real estate developers and asset managers in Europe and Asia. We expect that deal to close this quarter. It's about $40 billion of AUM, half of which are in the Japanese market. They have probably one of the longest-standing track records, retail and institutional, in industrial logistics in Japan. That in and of itself, I think, is a crown jewel business, but it also gives us real brand and critical mass in a developed market in Asia that we didn't have prior to the acquisition. Ares today is the third-largest developer and owner of warehouses in the U.S..
When we take our business and marry it with their European and Japanese business, we now become the third-largest owner and developer of warehouses in the world. That's going to give us a whole lot of opportunity on product development at different levels of the capital stack. I also think it's going to enhance our already differentiated information edge just as we get to now see the flow of goods in a more significant way around the world. What also comes with the acquisition is a large data center development capability team of about 65 people, all who have come from industry that have built a very attractive pipeline of large hyperscale data center campuses in the U.K., Japan, and Brazil, and will be able to now monetize that pipeline and transition into a pretty meaningful fund complex that we think is a big growth opportunity for us.
So there's a lot to do just to get that right. And then if you were to look and zoom out and say, "What capability is there in private markets investing or alternatives that we don't do?" There are very few things out there that we don't do now. So I think the bar for M&A has always been high. I think it's higher now than it's ever been just because, given our liquidity positioning and our experience, we now can drive a lot of growth organically or just turbocharging the growth of our acquired businesses. And I think something's really going to have to jump off the page in order for us to do M&A in the next year or two.
Let's switch it up and talk about private wealth. Today, Ares is one of the largest alt managers in the private wealth channel. Arguably, this channel has the most attractive growth prospects over 10 years. It looks like only a few players can actually win here. So what are your high-level thoughts? And I'm also curious in your build-out across the client channels. A lot of firms started with wirehouses, moved to IBDs, RIAs kind of out there. Where are you in that build-out? What do you still need to do?
Sure. So yeah, we're. We have a 150+ person wealth management servicing capability. That's similarly sized to our institutional relationship management, sales force. There is a lot of growth to be had in the wealth channel. The retail investor generally is underallocated to alts, and the advisor community, whether they sit in a wirehouse or RIA or IBD, is now beginning to push their clients more actively into the broad spectrum of private assets. I like the way you asked the question because when we talk about wealth, I think it's important that we anchor on what's exciting about it is its growth and capital formation. It's permanent or semi-permanent. So it's a diversifier, but it doesn't change our business, right? And I remind people of that is if we originate $100 billion of assets in any given year, we could fund it with non-traded funds.
We can fund it with institutional. We can fund it through our insurance affiliates. But the $100 billion is basically the driver of the business. So when we think about wealth, we think it's important that we build into that growth, which we've done, but that it always coexists with institutional funds and other forms of permanent capital. And that's really informed by our experience as asset managers. Before we tapped the institutional market and before we tapped the wealth market, our largest fund was a publicly traded BDC, Ares Capital Corporation. And we've seen over 20 years that when the markets are good, capital raising is healthy, deployment is good, but when the markets are bad, the retail investor tends not to want to allocate exactly at the moment they should be. So these markets behave differently.
When you get into volatile markets, the institutional market tends to turn on, so I think we learned a long time ago that if you want to be able to deliver the predictability of profit that we do, you need institutional funds that you can draw down and express a view on any market at any time. You need traded funds that allow you to scale in a certain way, and these non-traded funds are a big piece of it because they allow you to scale, but we don't want them to scale too quickly because, unlike a drawdown fund, when you get a dollar from the wealth channel, you have to invest it, and I've always felt philosophically one of the ways that we outperform as an alt manager is we choose not to invest at certain parts of the cycle, and we choose to invest excessively.
Giving that decision-making to the investor leans you towards procyclicality in a way that makes us a little uncomfortable, so we've been measured in the products that we put into the market, and we've been measured in the way that we've grown them, but they've grown substantially, so today, we have eight products in the market. We have 60 separate distribution partners in that channel. That's up from 40 a year ago. Each of our products is in at least one of the major wire platforms. We've been building internationally. 35% + of our flows are now coming from Europe and Asia, and the business has been ramping quite dramatically. In 2024, we did close to $11 billion in equity and $18 billion- $19 billion of levered assets in the channel. That was two and a half times prior year.
Not saying you should annualize, but if you looked at January on our existing products, we did $1.2 billion of equity in January. So really good consistent growth above trend, but probably, to your point, more measured than maybe some of the peers, just given the strength in the institutional fundraising part of the business too. And I think you'll continue to see some of these new products come online. I mentioned sports, media, and entertainment. We've introduced a core infrastructure product into the market. So we'll continue to bring new product in and scale them and diversify them. And like you said, I think we're today the third in the league tables in terms of capital raised in the market. And I would think that we'll be hovering around there for a while.
I think one thing that really reinforces that is the 20-year track record of your public BDC, ARCC. I think it's a 12% net, but top-performing BDC over the last 20 years through the financial crisis. A lot of your high-quality competitors, they have BDCs. They didn't do nearly as well. So it's, I think, one of the real positive qualities that.
Yeah, and that has helped. We had an established brand and performance track record in the channel even without the non-traded product. And I'm glad you mentioned it. It's cycle-tested at scale. And obviously, that matters a lot. At the end of the day, performance drives asset gathering. And so it's nice when the markets are healthy and capital flows are healthy, but at the end of the day, you have to perform because the assets follow performance.
Yeah. Sticking with retail, but moving into retirement, there's a lot of speculation that privates are going to move into the retirement channel now. We need to see some sort of rulemaking or legal cover from the Department of Labor first. We don't know if we're going to get that. So maybe everyone's getting ahead of themselves. But if it does happen, I think your business could be very well positioned for that. But maybe this thing is getting overhyped. What's your perspective on this?
It's always hard to say what's getting overhyped. I think in the world we live in, just my own social commentary, headlines are flying around a lot. And there are things to pay attention to and things not to pay attention to. The opportunity to get privates into their retirement portfolio is something to pay attention to, A, because I personally think it's great for the investors' long-term outcomes, and B, if it does, it will open up yet another channel of distribution for these products, which will be yet another opportunity for innovation and growth. I would reiterate what I said about wealth for defined contribution, that if we get a moment where privates can find their way into DC plans, that's great. It's growing. It's diversifying.
It may give us degrees of freedom to play around with product construction, but it doesn't necessarily transform the fundamental business of private markets investing, and so I think whenever we have these moments where we're seeing big growth, we should be excited and enthusiastic, but the reason that we have such a competitive mode around our business, you have to be able to create assets for these plans. Unlike listed securities, you can't just go out and buy them. You need thousands of people around the globe in local markets sourcing private transactions, structuring them, documenting them, managing them, right, and so the capital formation, in my opinion, whether it's wealth, DC plans, institute, that is not going to be the predictor of who wins. The winner in this business is who can actually generate sustainable origination advantages and high performance.
a long-winded way of saying, there's a lot of complexity to get to a place where plan sponsors feel comfortable owning privates in plans. It's going to require some rulemaking, in my opinion, or some proclamation that gives people comfort to take the risks that they're not currently taking. And if that happens, we and others like us are ready with product to bring into that channel. We're lining up partners to do it. But like I said, if it doesn't happen, our guidance is secure. If it happens, maybe we do a little bit better, or maybe we just start seeing some distribution shift from wealth to retirement. So we're excited about it like all of our peers are, but I just keep getting anchored on we have to stay focused on execution, on deployment, and performance. The asset piece of it has not been the challenge, frankly.
I mean, I think there's plenty of capital out there that wants access to the types of things that we do.
So if we do get rulemaking out of the DOL and defined contribution plan sponsors can actually select products based on their expectations for net returns, not just sort of the lowest fee, you don't have a target date fund. You don't have a mutual fund. You may not want one. Does Ares need a partner, or can they do some of this on a standalone basis?
I think it's going to be a combination of both. So we have CITs that are developed in partnership with platforms today. We have various partnerships in the retirement services business where we do other things together that we could, I think, pivot to distribute a broader set of product into the 401(k) market. So I think it's a combination. There are some where we would "do it ourselves" with a certain subset of the distribution. And then there are other places where we would probably want a deeper tie-up with someone who had a much broader retirement services business. But I think I feel confident in the partnerships that we have that we'd be able to make that pivot if the day comes.
Michael, you guys created an insurance company, Aspida. It's a different model that we see from some of the other large-cap alts, but also more recently, it was announced that T. Rowe Price was going to manage some of the assets in that business. So maybe explain what is going on there and is there a potential for T. Rowe Price, which is also one of the biggest retirement managers, to be a partner for Ares if this does open up on the retirement side?
Yeah. Aspida has been wildly successful relative to our business plan. We actually did a lot of work over the last seven years to build a clean de novo tech-enabled annuities platform, which was a lot of work. Did not get us to the scale that other people have accumulated, but we did it, I think, at a higher ROE with a lot of opportunity for profitable scale there that you don't get when you're buying legacy books. The business ended last year with $20 billion of assets, and we announced that we had raised $2.3 billion of equity in order to support the future growth of that platform. At our investor day that we referenced earlier, we told the market to expect that that business would be $50 billion by the end of 2028.
And so if you just look at the capital that we just raised, plus the annuity origination and reinsurance flows that we have, we're now kind of locked in on that as long as we continue to execute. The difference in our approach has been we've said we want to take a balance sheet-light approach to our insurance business. We clearly understand the synergies between private credit asset management and insurance. We have chosen not to make overwhelmingly large balance sheet commitments to support the growth of the insurance affiliate. So we own less than 25% of our insurance affiliate. We obviously have the administration of the balance sheet, and we manage 60%-65% of the assets. But by doing that, to your question about T.
Rowe, it's allowed us to be a little bit more open-source in the way that we bring people into the capital structure as our partner and the way that we deliver assets to third parties and the way we deliver value to the insurance company balance sheet. So we feel like we've created this model where somebody like a T. Rowe can become a meaningful strategic partner to Aspida. We can deliver assets to them that are meaningfully strategic to them. If you talk to them, I think that you will see that they're making meaningful investments in their insurance solutions business, particularly around their high-grade fixed income business. This gives them assets to continue to drive into that growth. It also gives Aspida equity and a distribution partner in the future for product.
We've done that with others as well, where we think that there's synergy between what they do and what we do. In terms of the partnership with T. Rowe, we have a long-standing partnership with them, good relationships at the highest levels of the firm, very strong partnership with Oak Hill, which is their private credit manager. There's nothing in our partnership that is prescriptive about working together in retirement services. I think, like any good partnership, in success and when opportunity comes knocking, you tend to look to your partners to see how you can work together. I wouldn't rule out a world where, even if it were non-exclusive, that we were working together in certain parts of retirement down the road.
Great. At this moment, we are running up on time, but we have time for a question or two if there's any in the audience. Please raise your hand. Are we ever run here in the middle row?
So after the 2023 regional bank crisis, we started to see banks partnering up with alt managers and announced SRTs. Just, do you expect to see more of these in the future with the banks and alts teaming up? And then how does Ares' relationship with the banks change in terms of sourced assets?
Sure. So I'm glad you asked the question because you have to dissect the whole bank partnership versus bank competition a little bit. One area of intense collaboration and cooperation is around SRTs. And it's interesting because you would think if we were going into a world of lighter bank regulation and wholesale change in bank regulatory capital frameworks that you would not see the amount of activity in the SRT market that we're seeing today. So Q4 was an incredibly busy time in the SRT market. That has rolled over into Q1, still very, very active. We and a small handful of others are meaningful players in that just because we have the scale and the asset expertise to look at a variety of different assets, renewables, consumer loans, fund finance portfolios, auto. So you need to have scale and asset capability to do it.
And so we're doing our fair share of those largely out of our alternative credit business. Spreads have tightened in that market. So we may see deployment there slow down if we don't see spreads gap out, but that's been a really fertile place to invest. And that's a win-win for the banks and for us. Coming on the backs of that, and we talked about this post the SVB crisis, the banks post SRT with kind of cleaner, easier-to-read balance sheets will then start to say, "What's a core business, and where do I have a core customer franchise that I want to monetize?" And they may do that in partnerships. So you've seen already, and you'll, I think, continue to see partnerships and flow agreements around certain parts of the business where someone doesn't want to exit a business, but they want more capital runway.
And so they'll enter into flow agreements or partnerships with folks like us. And we've done a number of those, as have our peers. And then there's the third bucket, which is kind of the headline of alternative asset manager XYZs partnering up with bank ABC to source. Those have not worked. So we have not seen in the market any real meaningful benefit that has come from those tie-ups. And my own evaluation of that is there's enough capital alternatives to those partnerships in the market that from the client experience standpoint, they're not compelled to borrow through the partnership the way that they would be if it were kind of monetized the bank's consumer book, if that makes sense, right? So I think generally there's a lot of positive cooperation happening. I think some of the headline-grabbing ones haven't really borne fruit.
So let me just close with one last question and bring it down to the Ares stock level. But Ares, I think, is a stock that plays offense and defense very well. You saw how it performed. It outperformed in 2022. And the stock has done very, very well over the last couple of years. But to new investors in the room, because Michael, I know you own a lot of stock. You're CEO. You're on the board. Why should they buy it today? And I'm looking at Jarrod right now. We didn't bring up European waterfalls, but there is a lot of embedded future earnings in the company without raising another dollar capital. But why should they look at it today? What's most attractive, and what are we missing?
I don't know if you're missing anything. I mean, I'll give you just a couple of high-level thoughts without getting into the weeds on European waterfalls and the like, so first and foremost, high-growth business through different market environments, so I think that is probably one of the most important takeaways. If you look at Ares as a company, we have grown at a 20% compound annual growth rate for 20+ years. And we've demonstrated that we can do it in good markets and in bad. And if you really go back and look at our track record, you'll actually see that we've grown faster in bad markets. We actually had a disproportionately high management fee growth during the GFC and COVID, so it speaks to the resilience of the business.
And a lot of that is structural in terms of the way our funds get raised and deployed and the amount of dry powder that we sit on. So to your other comment, as we sit here today, we have $133 billion of dry powder to put into the market. When you look at the amount of that capital that is not earning fee, because in the credit business, when you deploy capital, that's when we get paid. By deploying that capital, we have 30% management fee growth embedded just in the capital that we already own. So to your point, if we do nothing other than invest the money that we have, you're kind of hitting your 18-24-month growth forecast at a time when we're growing and diversifying our fundraising and distribution around the globe. So you got 20% growth, 40% + FRE or EBITDA margins.
We've said that depending on where we are in our deployment, that will grow 0-150 basis points a year. So you've got growth and margin expansion. And then to your point, vectors for growth and opening up new markets and profit participation that is starting to roll in that could accelerate from there. I also look at the nature of the profits that come off of this business: highly diversified, predictable. So when you look at the yield on the company relative to other financial services businesses, I don't know where the stock is today, but it's a 2.25%-2.5% yield. And that yield has been growing 20% + per year.
And when you look at our PEG ratio with our growth profile, we traded a meaningful discount to the PEG ratio of the S&P 500, which to me, as a growth investor, is the one that jumps off the page because I don't know very many companies that have been able to grow 20% per year for as long as we've had. You have some that can grow fast and then give it back, but it's been pretty close to linear growth. And when you look at the PEG ratio for that business relative to businesses that don't grow with the same level of consistency, for me, as a valuation metric, that's the one that I focus on the most.
Great. We will end it there. Mike, on behalf of all of us at Bank of America, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you.