Good morning, everybody. Welcome to day three of our financial services conference. I'm Ben Budish. I cover the U.S. brokers, asset managers, and exchanges, and really delighted for our next fireside chat to have Mike Arougheti, CEO of Ares.
Happy to be here. In the darkest conference room I think I've ever spoken before.
Well, all the lights are on you.
Thank you.
Maybe just to kick things off, give us a bit of your current view on the macro backdrop. What are you seeing in terms of underlying growth, health of portfolio companies across your credit business, and the broader platform?
Yeah, look, we're seeing continued fundamental strength in pretty much everything that we own. If you were to look at the middle market corporate portfolios, which I think is a pretty good representation of the real economy, as we reported last quarter, EBITDA growth year-over-year for that portfolio is about 9%. Credit metrics are still very strong when we look at interest coverage, well above two times. You look at where we sit on a loan-to-value basis, non-accruals and defaults well below historical averages. Tone in the boardroom is strong. Deal activity is picking up, so it feels pretty good out there. I think the reality when you look around the world, there are a lot of secular tailwinds, whether it's the AI CapEx that we're seeing globally.
When you look at the Eurozone and places like Canada, there's a move towards what we would call strategic autonomy, rearmament, investments in energy security. So there's just a lot right now, despite some of the headwinds that people are talking about in terms of rate hikes, et cetera. The fundamentals are still really strong.
Great. Why don't we spend some time on the traditional direct lending business? Maybe give us a bit of an update, too, on this market. How would you describe recent trends in spreads, loan covenants, pick inclusion, competition for deals, particularly given the evolution of capital formation in the BDC channel, what you're seeing from the bank side?
Yeah, look, we're the largest direct lender in the market, so I think we may experience the competitive dynamic differently than many. Just to put it in perspective, we have close to 350 investment people in the U.S. and Europe that are executing on that core direct lending business. When you just look at the amount of capital that we raise, the amount of capital that we're able to deploy, the origination and information advantages are pretty significant. So anytime you ask me this question, I'm going to largely tell you that we feel good about our ability to deploy the capital that we're raising into really attractive opportunities. That's true now. What has happened, because of some of the slowdown in retail capital raising, particularly for some of our larger competitors, we've actually seen a pretty meaningful improvement in terms for new transactions.
Spreads today are probably 25 basis points- 50 basis points higher than they were a year ago. Upfront fees or original issue discount, OID, is about 50 basis points- 100 basis points more than it was. Leverage levels are probably a half a turn to a turn better than they were a year ago. As importantly, the deal structures in terms of covenants and documentation have meaningfully improved as the market has shifted to a little bit more of a pro-lender versus pro-borrower positioning. We continue to see, I would say, normal levels of competition. Interestingly, at the upper end of the markets that we play in, and you and I have talked about this, one of the things I think that differentiates us, in addition to the size and scale and the track record, is that we actually play across the full spectrum of company size.
You'll see us in any given quarter finance a company with $5 billion of EBITDA all the way to maybe a couple billion. The relative value opportunity shifts between the different parts of the market. I would say today, because of some of the capital dynamics, we're seeing better relative value and less competition at the upper end of the market than we are at the lower end of the market, where you still have a number of players that are looking to deploy. Not to say that that's all that relevant, but there's definitely a noticeable shift just given some of what we're seeing in the capital flows.
Very interesting. You sort of mentioned briefly earlier you feel good about deal activity picking back up. Maybe talk about that a little bit. The business has historically relied on transaction activity to drive net new credit, earning AUM growth. What does the deployment pipeline look like? How are opportunities differing across regions? Your near-term outlook for credit deployment, what macro or exogenous factors-
Sure
you think may be needed to accelerate activity?
I want to comment on one thing you just mentioned, though, before I give you the view on deployment.
Please
I do think there's a misconception that our deployment is reliant on new transaction activity. When you look at the businesses that we have around the globe and the capabilities that we've developed, what you'll see, at least over the last five or six years, is that the deployment is growing regardless of what the new transaction environment is. That's really a commentary on the diversification of the strategies, primary market versus secondary market, liquid versus illiquid, debt versus equity, opportunistic versus par. The construction of the portfolio now allows us to deploy pretty consistently regardless of new M&A volume. The other thing I'll mention in the core direct lending business, which is why I think people still hold this view that it's transaction dependent, about half of our deployment comes from within the existing portfolio.
One of the big advantages we have given our, excuse me, our market share is that the portfolios are so large. If all you do is relever the compounding of your existing portfolio companies, take that 9% EBITDA growth that I mentioned, that's going to allow that portfolio to compound at a very healthy rate and gives us real consistent deployment into the companies that we know best. When you really look at the growth, there's a lot of things that are driving deployment away from M&A volumes, and I would expect that to continue to improve as the business grows and diversifies. In terms of where we sit, and this may be as commentary back to the fundamental strength that we're seeing in the portfolios. Last quarter, we, on our earnings call, talked about pipelines across the platform at record levels.
As we sit here today for this quarter, it's about 20% up from that prior record. We're seeing transaction volumes pull through, over the summer and into the new quarter. It's very broad-based across pretty much every strategy. I'd note, asset-based finance is significantly busy. European direct lending, interestingly, very, very busy. Infrastructure and infrastructure debt, very busy. Even if we're in an environment where U.S. direct lending is slower than in historical periods, a lot of those other businesses are picking up the slack. We're pretty excited about the deployment picture.
Great. Maybe on the other side, LP appetite for private credit appears quite healthy. How are investors thinking about that asset class today? What do allocation levels look like? How do you think about the opportunity to better serve LPs with credit products over the long term? What are your thoughts on the sort of I think one of your competitors has coined this fixed income replacement, but are you seeing opportunities like that similarly to serve a broader part of your LPs' traditional portfolios?
Yeah. It's interesting because there and we'll probably cover it because people love talking about the retail flows, but I can say unequivocally that the institutional demand for private credit is incredibly strong, and it's probably as good as we've ever seen it. I think that's somewhat just secular. Back to the fixed income replacement theme, having been doing this for 30 years, private credit is now a core strategic allocation in most institutional investor portfolios. But if you were to look at the percentage of their portfolio allocated, today it's about 4% to private credit, and that compares with 10% - 15% for things like private equity, and real estate, which are more mature allocations. There's a long way to go to achieve what I would call the types of allocations that people are used to in alts.
I think what they're drawn to is the consistency of the performance. They are drawn to the floating rate nature of the loans, which gives somewhat of a hedge against the rate volatility. It is high yielding and high income. As you're thinking about illiquid exposures, the ability to generate 10% + type rates of return in and of itself is liquidity-generating and I think gives them a lot of flexibility as they think about portfolio construction. If you look at private credit, generally speaking, it's intended to deliver excess returns to the liquid equivalent markets of somewhere between 150 basis points and 300 basis points, which is a very meaningful amount of outperformance for most institutional investors who are trying to generate 5% - 7% actuarial returns. If we could deliver 150 basis points- 300 basis points with good credit performance, there's going to be significant demand for that.
To put it in context, today's market, based on everything that we're seeing, that excess spread is probably about 235 basis points, which is why you're seeing the demand continue to pull through the market. That's the secular thing. I think cyclically, because of some of the outflows in the non-traded BDC sector and some of the spread widening and structural improvement that I referenced earlier, a lot of the sophisticated institutions view this as a vintage where they can allocate meaningfully to capture that excess return. In terms of fixed income replacement, yes and no. I don't know that privates will ever fully replace, but they're definitely taking share from the traditional markets for all the reasons I articulated. I think most institutional investors are getting more sophisticated structurally about how they think about the relative value between the two markets.
When they look at it, I think it is driving more capital, both on the investment-grade and sub-investment-grade side to the private market.
Maybe one more question, sort of sticking with the direct lending market, just because we get asked this question a lot. I know you get asked. Given the asset class' rapid growth over the past decade, what does the longer-term outlook look like? I think anecdotally, maybe equivalent in size to the leverage loan market, the high-yield bond market, the direct lending market. Does that increase over time? If you think about five years ago versus today, what are we going to be talking about five years from now?
Yeah. I'm glad you asked it. Private credit, there's a misconception, again, that it has grown quickly, and it just appeared out of nowhere. If you actually look at the last 10 years, private credit has grown linearly at roughly a 12-ish percent growth rate, which is very much in line with the growth in private equity, very much in line with the growth in real estate. I think one of the reasons why people are experiencing it, aside from the media loving the story, is it's a compounder, so you never see big drawdowns in private credit. So the growth is year in, year out, 10%-15%, whereas I think some of the other asset classes, when you look back at the CAGR, you'll see it's 15, but it may have been a little bit more volatile.
Interestingly, if you were to look at private equity, which is the large consumer of direct lending, there is about $3.8 trillion of private equity invested in the market today. That is against, pick your number, $1.5 trillion -$ 2 trillion of private credit. In today's capital structures, at a minimum, there is a dollar of private credit for every dollar of private equity. That would stand to reason if the loan and high-yield market do not grow, that private credit has a lot of runway for growth just to meet the demands of that embedded private equity dry powder, putting aside all of the growth in the non-direct lending parts of the private credit market, opportunistic credit, asset-based real estate, infrastructure, high grade, et cetera. I think when we look five years from now, you will continue to see the market compounding at that similar growth rate.
I think you will see it growing faster than the loan and bond market, and I think the non-direct lending parts of the market will become more obvious growth vectors for people as well.
Got it. Maybe pivoting a bit to ABF. It is one of the relatively newer themes attracting investor attention within private credit, but you have been active here for some time. Maybe you should start, give us a bit of an overview of the current ABF activities at Ares. Where exactly are you participating?
Yeah. It is interesting. ABF similar, right? We have been in the ABF business for 20 years. The size of the market opportunity has been growing, and the opportunity for folks like Ares is improving because of structural changes in the markets, predominantly the securitization apparatus on the street post the GFC. It is getting more attention now because of the ability for folks like us and our peers to capture the investment-grade portion of the securitized market, whereas prior to the affiliation with insurers, we were largely focused on the sub-investment-grade parts of that market. It is a very difficult market to access in terms of the capabilities of investors that you need. I think in everything we do, we like to think that we have a scale advantage that I talked about earlier.
But there's a real talent edge in ABF because when you think about what asset-based finance is, it's lending against cash flows being generated by portfolios of assets. That could be everything from residential mortgages to healthcare receivables, equipment leases, data center leases, 35 subcategories. To be expert in all of those sub-asset classes, expert in structuring technology, access to the right types of financings and the right rating relationships, a really complicated set of skills. What you'll see in that market is it's much more concentrated in terms of who the real competitors are of size. We've been doing it as long as anybody. The business today is about $60 billion of AUM in our ABF business. We have historically focused on the non-rated part of the market.
If you were to look at our AUM, about half of our AUM is in the bottom part of that capital structure. We have raised four of the five largest institutional funds in that part of the market and have a real differentiated track record and capability. The reason we focused on that part of the market is that's, we think, the least commoditized part of the market, meaning that if we can really have the skilled investment capability to generate those 15%-type rates of return on the equity, we can access the various financing markets to drive equity value, whether that's banks, securitization market, insurance companies, et cetera.
That being said, there's a real synergy between the non-rated part of the market and the rated part of the market, and so we have not ignored scaling in the IG part of the market, which represents about half of what we do. Unlike a lot of our peers, we have de-emphasized the consumer end of the market. We have very low consumer exposure. We have very low auto exposure, which is where a lot of people play because there's huge volumes there. Instead, what we've been focusing on is trying to leverage some of the other parts of Ares to drive volumes into that business. Places like our infrastructure and data center business, leveraging our bank and capital markets relationships to do things like SRTs and portfolio trades with our bank counterparties. A lot of fund finance and secondary solutions in partnership with our secondaries business.
There's real differentiated sourcing there versus just having a flow agreement with a consumer originator. Look, it's a big growth market. I think we've got some real competitive advantage there. The track record's great. We just closed our third fund in that fund family at the hard cap, meaningfully larger than our prior fund, and we did it in six months with one closing. That business has really good momentum.
Great. In a minute, I want to ask you about AI and your data center strategy. Sticking with the ABF side, a significant portion of the recent private credit narrative has been focused on data center and GPU financing, particularly in the IG opportunities, where historically you haven't put as much of emphasis. As you expand your AI exposure to the real assets platform, how would you describe your appetite to participate more directly on the financing side and more on the IG side?
Yeah. Look, for those of you who've met us before, we have said to all of you and set goals for ourselves that we want to grow our FRE 16%-20% per year, and we want to grow our distributable income RI, 20%+, have that be reflected in a stable, growing dividend, and we want to be balance sheet light. The reason I say that as a framing is we don't want to be all things to all people. Back to your prior comment, one of the reasons why we focused on sub-investment grade ABF versus investment grade is the fee rates are eight times higher, and so we can concentrate a lot of our capital and capability on fewer deals to generate higher rates of return and higher levels of profitability.
The reason I mention that is the capital requirements in the AI space right now are mind-blowingly large. There's about $5 trillion of capital that needs to get invested into that market between now and 2030. If you were to look at the breakdown of that, about $800 billion is just data center shells. About $1.2 trillion plus is ancillary infrastructure, transmission, energy, cooling, et cetera. The other $3 trillion-$3.5 trillion is chips. You could be led to a place where, wow, there's $3.5 trillion of investable market there. That's where I want to play because that's the largest TAM. Our view has been we want to go where there's the best risk-adjusted return. In our opinion, the best risk-adjusted return is in that order, which is shells and powered shells, adjacent infrastructure, and then third, GPUs.
The reality is when you look at GPU financing, putting aside structural enhancements, there's going to be an embedded technology risk in our opinion that people can't possibly underwrite as well as they can a data center itself. No one could really articulate, at least to me, what the depreciation curve looks like for that technology. The market is offering 100 basis points- 200 basis points of incremental return to get after that TAM because the market, the supply-demand of capital gap is largest there. The reason I started with what our goals are, there's so much opportunity in those first two categories to deploy capital on behalf of our investors at the rates of return that they want for us to hit those growth goals and beyond, that we're largely setting a very, very high bar for the GPU financing.
That may sound somewhat contrarian, but again, I think it is a different underwriting, different set of risks. With a lens on largely the non-investment grade side of the market, I think you have to be leading with your risk appetite and not your appetite to deploy.
Got it. Really interesting. Well, maybe let us dig a little bit more into Ares strategy. You closed on GCP, your most recent acquisition, expanding your presence into Asia, deepening your infrastructure capabilities. Maybe talk about the path forward from here. The opportunity set is significant. Maybe talk about where you are sourcing opportunities, where you are finding the most attractive areas for deployment, and as you think about the next several years, how quickly could this business scale?
Yeah. Look, we talked about this on our earnings call. We have made a number of acquisitions over the last six or seven years. Each one of them has brought a real set of strategic capabilities to the platform, and each one of them in their own right has scaled the way that we wanted it to, and benefited from the revenue synergies that we underwrote. The GCP acquisition is no exception. The investment thesis for making that acquisition was really threefold. One, we acquired, I think, the market-leading real estate platform in the Japanese market. That is a geographically tight, closed market for real estate. It is a very relationship-driven market, both on sourcing land, constructing projects, and then the bank capital markets.
We were able to acquire a market leader in a fairly constrained market with a 30-year track record, and a fully developed fund family on institutional and publicly traded funds in the industrial real estate business. So warehouses. The reason that was important is we believe in the growth thesis in the Japanese market. Now it gives us a beachhead to grow other alternative businesses given the brand reputation that the team has in that market. Combined with our industrial warehouse business now has us as the second or third largest developer, owner, operator, manager of warehouses in the globe. We control about 750 million square feet of industrial warehouses, which I will come to in a second why that is so important. Two, they had a European industrials business, which was a very, very significant development capability. They lacked, in my opinion, some asset management capacity.
We were able to fold them in and vertically integrate their development teams into our teams so that we've now created this one global logistics powerhouse across Ares, and we're seeing the benefit of that in terms of our land sourcing, development cost, leasing, so on and so forth. That's been a huge home run. Japan global consolidation. Then the third was the data center business. Maybe jumping off of some of the things that we talked about earlier, there's huge synergy between the industrial warehouse business and the data center business. If you just think about the shell of a data center, the construction is quite similar. We have a running start because in order to be as large as we are in the warehouse side, you're constantly land banking.
You're looking generally in parts of the market where there's power, proximity to transportation, proximity to energy and transmission. The ability to pivot some of that pipeline into our data center development business was a big benefit. GCP, to their credit, was farther along than we were on that front, and they had been pursuing a pretty basic strategy, which we still adhere to, which is to land bank and build a pipeline of potential development opportunities adjacent to very large metropolitan areas around the globe, where there would be latency, high persistent demand just for core cloud compute, and therefore would attract the most creditworthy tenants with the most favorable leases. When we acquired GCP, we acquired a pipeline of projects that were in flight in Tokyo, Osaka, London, São Paulo, and Arlington, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C.
We very quickly raised a fund, institutional fund to fund the first phase of the Japanese data center development, and then set out to effectively institutionalize the asset management of the remainder of the pipeline. We had the pipeline, and they had a development team that is branded Ada Infrastructure. That's about 100 people, all from within the industry that are expert at developing data centers. We took their pipeline and their development team, Aresified it, added institutional asset management against it, and are now raising capital to fund that data center development pipeline in a global data center fund, and we're really excited about that. It is differentiated because of the quality of these projects. We are seeing really solid leasing activity pull through, so the thesis is being validated in real time. We didn't have to pay a lot for it, right?
When you think about what we bought, we bought operating losses from the development team and a pipeline of land. When you put all that together, a year or two later, when these funds are coming online, that's going to convert into meaningful FRE. We thought we bought it well without a lot of embedded constraint. Super exciting. The core real estate business is doing everything that we hoped it would do. Just as an example, we closed our fifth Japanese industrial development fund a couple of weeks ago. It was a $4 billion fund. It's almost two times as large as the predecessor. We saw a lot of Ares investors that had not been investors in Japan or GCP investors come into that product, and so that was their largest fund closing in that family. We hit the hard cap.
It happened quickly, and so the distribution synergy between the two companies, as illustrated by that fund, was proven out pretty well there too.
Great. Maybe switching gears, let's talk a bit about the wealth business. I certainly want to ask about the non-traded BDCs, but maybe setting the stage a little more high level. I think you've got eight semi-liquid products in the market now. Can we talk a bit about the distribution footprint? What you're seeing outside the U.S., where is adoption building most rapidly? And maybe before we get into ASIF, if you could touch on Ares Core Infrastructure that's been particularly successful. Curious, any kind of early reads on the sports media and entertainment strategy, which is also pretty differentiated.
Sure. Wealth is an important driver of growth for us, but I'd say it's as importantly just a driver of diversification of capital raising and distribution. While there has been some negative headlines around non-traded BDCs, which it sounds like we're going to touch on, the long-term trend has been towards growth in the channel, and my view is, in order to access that growth, you need to have a real diverse product set. So we have eight distinct products that cover kind of everything that we do at Ares, from real estate to private equity secondaries, private credit, sports infrastructure. Because you want to give the advisor the opportunity to create a portfolio for their client that reflects an institutional allocation to alternatives. You need a meaningful investment in sales and sales support.
We have close to 200 people around the globe that are interacting with the advisor community in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. And you need a significant systems machine to just support the selling and servicing of this type of product. Everything from just client onboarding to advisor education, et cetera. So if you want to actually tap into this, you have to make a meaningful investment. My view is also, if you haven't made that meaningful investment already, you've probably missed the opportunity to scale because the platforms have already chosen their partners. The brands are already being developed with the end client and the advisor. We currently are probably the number two player in the wealth channel for alternatives. We have somewhere between a 10% and 11% market share, which we're thrilled with. It's a very good diversifier.
It has attractive economics in the sense that we get paid on those assets when we raise them, as opposed to institutional funds where we tend to get paid as we deploy. It's a good complement just in terms of the P&L generation. But we are still very heavily geared towards our institutional fundraising business, where we have a real differentiated advantage. I think it's important to note, despite all of the noise this quarter, Q3, we're going to do about $4 billion gross of equity. That'll be our third-best quarter on record. I think that speaks to the diversification of the product, the strength of the track record, and just thematically, a couple of the products you mentioned are seeing meaningful demand. ACI, which is our Ares Core Infrastructure Fund product, is a tax-advantaged infrastructure fund. It is meeting a lot of demand.
Did about $2.7 billion this quarter. So of that $4 billion gross, about $2.7 billion was in that infrastructure product. So even while you're seeing some slowdown in U.S. direct lending appetite, it's being more than compensated for with the growth in infra. We're seeing increasing demand for our non-traded REIT product. We have a really differentiated 1031 exchange program where people can actually exchange assets into our fund to take back REIT shares. I'm oversimplifying a complex product, but really, really attractive product as well, and so that's helping to drive through the noise a little bit.
Great. Maybe let's touch on the non-traded BDC market and the ASIF. Seems like the negative headlines that have dominated the conversation have eased. We're seeing some of the Q3 redemption requests, incremental requests seem to be coming down. I'm curious if there's anything you can share with what you're seeing at Ares, at ASIF, how you expect that narrative to evolve, what price you might-
Yeah. A couple of our peers have already announced their redemptions, and they have clearly at least flatlined, and in many cases, decreased. So you are definitely seeing absorption of that redemption queue. We have been very, very clear in the way we talk about the redemption queue that this is largely a non-U.S. family office and small institution phenomenon. So if you were to look at our redemption queue in ASIF, 50% of our redemption queue came from 10 non-U.S. family office and small institutions. There's something structural there. We saw it a couple of years ago when the REITs were going through a redemption cycle. That same investor class tends to be a little bit more volatile than the core, what I would call well-advised U.S. European individual client.
I think the industry is now working structurally to try to prevent that from happening in the future by looking at different structures and different incentives to align those folks to the behavior that we see elsewhere. At least in the case of ASIF, I think that component was about $1.2 billion of redemptions two quarters ago. It was $600 million last quarter, and we'll continue to see that kind of drift down. I think the most important thing, which is what people should be focusing on, is what is the core individual investor doing? If you were to look before the redemption cycle started outside of the U.S., there was a pretty regular way, what I would call normalized redemption queue of about 2% of NAV. That's just kind of the ordinary course liquidity.
That spiked for us in the 3%-3.5% range as part of this redemption queue, and has now been coming down pretty dramatically. It was down 35% quarter-over-quarter last quarter, and I think it'll be down a similar amount this quarter. So there's definitely been normalization in the non-individual part of the market, and I think the individual investor is now behaving exactly as we saw them before the noise. I think we're almost. Depends on which fund you look at, but it's a couple of quarters away, I think, before that institutional piece gets absorbed, and we kind of go back.
The other thing I would highlight, because we went into this redemption cycle under-levered in ASIF, the combination of strong gross fundraising early in the year, capping the redemptions at the contractual 5% and re-leveraging, despite the noise, I actually think you're going to see the fund grow this year.
Great.
I think that'll be positive.
Great. Let's move to talk about capital allocation. We talked about GCP. You've completed a handful of acquisitions over the past few years, Landmark, a few others. Some recent media reports have suggested an interest in expanding the firm's traditional PE capabilities. You sort of alluded to this as an area where you could be more scaled, but there's some pretty explicit suggestions made by the press. Just curious if you could comment on any of that and maybe more high-level thoughts on potential inorganic growth opportunities. What are the characteristics that make an acquisition attractive for Ares?
Yeah. I'll try to be quick because we're getting short on time. If you think about what I just articulated for GCP, I'll digress for a second. Landmark was an acquisition, as an example, we made six years ago to get into the secondaries business at a time when we thought the secondaries business was going to go through transformational growth. The reason we made the acquisition was we wanted to enter that period of growth from a position of scale and strength. They had been a pioneer in the secondary space. They had $25 billion of AUM. They had a 30-year track record. They had a database of funds and transactions that would be almost impossible for anybody who hadn't been in this business for 30 years to replicate. They had a quantitative research capability that we've been able to leverage into other parts of the business.
But most importantly, when we looked at it, we saw an opportunity to drive fundamental change in the business. With that platform, we transformed their private equity secondaries product offering to include GP stakes, GP solutions. We raised a wealth product called Ares Private Markets Funds. That's about a $6 billion fund now, a couple of years later. We launched a credit secondaries business, which wasn't even a market three years ago, and we raised $7.1 billion, which was our largest secondaries fund on record. Under our ownership, the business has diversified, scaled, we've doubled the AUM, we've almost tripled the profitability of that business, and now have a right to win in this secular growth trend in secondaries.
The things we look for are, it has to be highly strategic, where we feel like we can really drive edge into the business, make it better, and that they're going to bring something unique to the platform that we don't have. It has to be financially accretive. The good news is most of the acquisitions that we have made, and I would expect we'll make in the future, are non-competitive situations where our corporate strategy teams are really spending lots and lots of time creating bilateral transaction opportunities for counterparties we like. Then probably most importantly, just given the way we think about our own growth, is it has to be culturally accretive, meaning that in the asset management business, the people are critically important.
Even if it checks the first two boxes, if we don't feel like the people that are coming onto the platform will fit in well here with our investment culture and thrive, we won't do it. All that being said, it's a big world out there. We're constantly looking for opportunities to grow. Given our balance sheet positioning, profitability, to your point about capital allocation, and just given the capability set, the bar for acquisition is getting higher and higher. Because what we are also learning, just take the secondaries for example, we were able to meaningfully transform that business organically. When you do that, obviously, it comes at a much lower creation multiple with a lot more control.
I think for the foreseeable future, organic opportunities are probably more accretive and more likely to flourish here than going out into the market and buying things is my guess.
Got it. Well, unfortunately, we're out of time. Mike, what a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Thank you, guys.