Blue Owl Capital Inc Class A Stock

Good morning, and welcome to Blue Owl Capital's Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I'd like to advise all parties that this conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Ann Dai, Head of Investor Relations for Blue Owl.

Thanks, operator, and good morning to everyone. Joining me today are Marc Lipschultz, our Co-Chief Executive Officer; and Alan Kirshenbaum, our Chief Financial Officer.

I'd like to remind our listeners that remarks made during the call may contain forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future performance or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that are outside the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those described from time to time in Blue Owl Capital's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

We'd also like to remind everyone that we'll refer to non-GAAP measures on the call, which are reconciled to GAAP figures in our earnings presentation available on the Shareholders section of our website at blueowl.com. Please note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any Blue Owl fund.

This morning, we issued our financial results for the third quarter of 2026, reporting fee-related earnings, or FRE of $0.27 per share and distributable earnings or DE of $0.24 per share. We declared a dividend of $0.23 per share for the third quarter payable on November 23 to holders of record as of November 10. During the call today, we'll be referring to the earnings presentation, which we posted to our website this morning. So please have that on hand to follow along.

With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Marc.

Thank you so much, Anne. This morning, we reported our financial results for the third quarter of 2026, highlighting 15% FRE growth and 14% DE growth over the last 12 months. Our growth was supported by accelerated management fee growth on a sequential basis and ongoing strength in fundraising, including a record institutional capital raising quarter. This fundraising came from a diversified set of strategies, investors and geographies, driving AUM growth of 12% year-over-year to $330 billion.

We have continued to demonstrate our central position as one of the most scaled providers of capital across the credit, real assets and GP stakes markets, which has made us an invaluable partner to businesses across public and private markets, including some of the largest companies in the world. Over the last 12 months, we have deployed a substantial amount of capital with more investment-grade counterparties than ever before. This activity has been supported by robust fundraising from an increasingly global set of investors with $49 billion of new capital raised across Blue Owl over the last 12 months. And our AUM not yet earning fees continues to grow with more than $36 billion of AUM, nearly 30% higher than the same time last year that will drive an incremental $400 million of fees as deployed.

We've also distributed a near record amount to investors with more than $20 billion returned to investors over the last 12 months. The attractive income streams being generated by our funds are a key component of the continued strong performance across our strategies, both on an absolute basis and relative to public benchmarks. Most importantly, we've maintained our investment discipline and rigorous underwriting standards across a widely fluctuating set of rate and economic backdrops, leaning into markets where we see outsized return per unit of risk and remaining cautious when we don't see appropriate returns returns. Fundamentally, we apply a capital preservation mindset to everything we do, which means we look to protect the downside for our investors, and we believe the strong performance of our products through a myriad of market backdrops reflects this focus.

We started 2026 with the market anticipating 2 or more additional rate cuts by the Fed this year. And of course, 10 months later, that perspective has shifted dramatically with one rate hike announced in September and additional hikes anticipated over the next 6 months. The significant moves in rate expectations and yields have created opportunities in key portions of the market we feel well positioned to lean into. In Direct Lending, our loan portfolio is floating rate, meaning that not only are we evaluating new deal flow of higher base rates in a wider spread environment than 6 months ago, but our existing loan book reprices as the SOFR curve moves. This dynamic directly benefits investors in our BDCs and funds through higher net interest income and subsequently benefits Blue Owl through Part 1 fees.

Similarly, in Alternative Credit, we are seeing occasions to invest attractively in floating rate loans and we're buying fixed rate assets at better terms. For insurance clients, we are seeing opportunities to generate higher excess spread across investment-grade credit as market volatility creates dislocations. And our Real Estate Credit team is seeing more demand than ever across loans and various bridge financing structures with more favorable terms than we have seen in some time. We're seeing a lot to like as far as investment opportunities in the current market, and that enthusiasm is echoed by the strong investor demand we continue to see across Blue Owl business, which I will highlight in greater detail shortly.

Outside of rates, a dominant theme in market activity remains the significant capital needed to fund the expansion of compute across cloud and AI, and Blue Owl occupies a central role in this ecosystem. Although AI is understandably in focus today, as a reminder, much of our digital infrastructure footprint is tied to cloud, which continues to grow in excess of 20% annually at the hyperscalers. In keeping with our philosophy across the firm of focusing on income-generating downside protected investing, our digital infrastructure strategy nearly entirely faces strong investment-grade tenants. We own the physical infrastructure that is critical to the digital economy to grow, and we typically lease it out for 15 years to 20 years with annual rent escalators, creating a highly predictable and growing stream of rental income for our investors. The role we are taking in this digital economy is to be an important and reliable partner to the hyperscalers while limiting our risk on short-term re-leasing, construction timing, site energization or token pricing. Our investors look to us to be their predictable allocation to the AI and compute opportunity while generating very strong returns for investment-grade exposure. We are one of the largest players in this arena, both in terms of our digital infrastructure footprint and the amount of capital we have raised to address this generational opportunity.

Our approach to digital infrastructure builds on the foundation established by our leading triple Net Lease strategy. Across 17 years and more than 6,000 properties, our core expertise has been in owning mission-critical properties, leasing them to investment-grade companies and generating attractive returns for our investors, and we think we have done that quite well. It's been about a year since the narrative storm around private credit started, and we now have a lot of information available to address the questions that were posed at that time. There have been broad speculation that the industry was going to go through a stress test, and I think the data has proven out in our favor in terms of credit quality. In fact, our direct lending strategy has been one of the top performers over the past year as far as portfolio health, non-accruals and loss rates. We think we have proven that these achievements resulted from our investment discipline and a rigorous investor-focused mindset that continues to resonate with investors.

Finally, as it relates to fundraising, the $49 billion of total capital we have raised over the last 12 months reflects continued investor confidence in our strategies and our capabilities as a disciplined manager. Our investors recognize that we have generated tremendous value on an absolute and relative return basis. And as a result, they have continued to commit more capital to our strategies. And what is becoming more obvious over time is that our business is far more diversified than many have perceived it to be, with growth coming from an increasingly broad set of strategies, investors and geographies.

Institutional and insurance investors have driven about 70% of our last 12-month equity capital raised, and these investors committed approximately 20% more to our funds than this time last year and over 150% more than the same period 2 years ago. Notably, credit was nearly 45% of our equity capital raised over the last 12 months and 55% in the third quarter, reflecting continued investor engagement contrary to popular narratives. Our credit platform raised over 20% more equity capital from institutional and insurance investors over the last 12 months than the prior year. And real estate equity capital raised over the last 12 months grew by 45%. Year-to-date, approximately 1/3 of institutional investor activity was driven by re-ups, about 1/3 was driven by new investors and about 1/3 was driven by the cross-sell of existing investors into new products and strategies, highlighting strong underlying expansion of our client base.

Blue Owl's global reach and strong standing with investors was recognized earlier this month by [indiscernible], who published their inaugural private markets ranking and named Blue Owl as one of the top 10 global fund managers on the basis of capital raised from institutional investors over the last 5 years. In Wealth, we have raised $11 billion of equity capital over the last 12 months despite the headline environment and have seen recovery in gross inflows from May levels while redemption requests continue to decline. Our distribution partners remain very supportive and engaged with 20 new platform launches so far this year and a similar level of launches expected over the next handful of quarters. Net flows for the last 12 months remained positive, and performance in these products remains very strong on an absolute basis and increasingly differentiated on a relative basis.

As a reminder, when rates are rising and spreads are widening and the world feels more uncertain, that is an environment when credit tends to outperform. Looking back at 2022, the last time the market saw such rate hikes, direct lenders were some of the best performers and OCIC was the best performer among the 5 largest non-traded BDCs in the market. We continue to emphasize a performance-first education-focused approach, highlighting the out-performance of our funds to peer products and public market equivalents. Over time, we expect that strong fundamental results will outweigh the narratives that were prominent during the first half of 2026.

In closing, what we have seen and continue to see across our business is durability, resilience and excellent investment results. We think the proof is evident in the robust fundraising that reflects investor support and conviction around what we are doing. Our business is growing across all facets, and we remain very optimistic about what is ahead for Blue Owl. With that, let me turn it to Alan to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Marc. Good morning, everyone. As we highlighted in this morning's earnings presentation, Blue Owl grew FRE by 15% and DE by 14% over the last 12 months, with management fee growth of 11%, excluding the impact of management fee offsets. Our FRE margin for the 9 months year-to-date is 58.6%, slightly above our outlook for the year. AUM not yet paying fees increased to $36 billion, representing approximately $400 million of expected annual management fees once deployed. This is equivalent to approximately [ 16% ] embedded growth from our 2025 management fees. As this capital is drawn down and put to work, it converts into fee-paying AUM and will continue to support management fee growth across our platforms.

We raised $12.6 billion of total capital during the quarter, bringing our last 12-month total capital raise to $49 billion, the equivalent of 16% of our total AUM at this time last year. 45% of our total fundraising over the last 12 months was to our credit platform, and we have seen broad-based interest across Direct Lending, Alternative Credit, Investment-grade Credit, GP-led secondaries and cross-asset mandates as our platform capabilities continue to expand. During the third quarter, we raised $5.6 billion in credit across a number of strategies, including $2.3 billion in investment grade, $1.8 billion in direct lending and $1.1 billion in alt credit. And included in these totals $1 billion insurance mandate from [indiscernible] that further strengthens the partnership we announced in 2025. Fundraising has been particularly strong in our real assets platform, which has seen an increase of 37% in total capital raised over the last 12 months.

During the third quarter, we held a final close of our European Net Lease Fund at $1.8 billion, above the previous hard cap of approximately $1.7 billion. And we are up to $8.2 billion raised for the seventh vintage of our net lease drawdown product above the fund's previous hard cap of $7.5 billion and inclusive of co-invest have raised over $10 billion. We had a record institutional quarter and over the last 12 months, institutional and insurance investors comprised almost 3/4 of equity capital raised. In Private Wealth, third quarter inflows were 14% higher sequentially. We continue to see bifurcation in flow trends between the non-traded BDC products and our other wealth-focused products.

For OCIC, redemption requests declined for the second quarter in a row, and we continue to see limited new participation in the redemption queue with over 90% of OCIC's 90,000 shareholders remaining fully invested. For ORENT, [indiscernible] and OWLCX, there was no initial uptick in redemption requests to begin with, and we saw a stronger recovery to inflows from second quarter levels as the secondary impact from headline noise faded. The percent of redemption requests at ORENT have actually declined 5 quarters in a row and the low level of redemption requests this quarter represents a 9-quarter low. And as it relates to ORENT inflows, we continue to see momentum building here. We're very encouraged by the most recent fundraising trends, which includes increasing contributions from a tax-motivated audience with year-to-date inflows from 1031 exchange structures tripling from this time last year. And early progress for our newer wealth-focused products has been good despite more limited distribution footprints with our digital infrastructure fund, [indiscernible], reaching over $4.5 billion of AUM in less than a year and our alternative credit interval fund, OWLCX, approaching $3 billion of AUM, making it one of the largest interval funds in the market after having launched just over a year ago.

So to summarize our fundraising efforts here for a moment, this was a record institutional fundraise quarter for Blue Owl. This was a record institutional fundraise quarter for our credit platform. And year-to-date 2026, we've already raised about as much as our fundraise total for the full year 2024 and 70% more than the full year 2023. Moving on to business performance across our platforms.

In Credit, last 12-month gross returns were 9.3% for direct lending and 10.3% for alternative credit, comparing favorably to relevant public credit benchmarks over the same period. We continue to see widening dispersion of outcomes across managers with Blue Owl's performance a positive standout. Portfolio health remains robust with no meaningful changes to our direct lending watch list, portfolio growth trends or our realized loss rate, which sits at a low 12 basis points per annum for the total direct lending portfolio and at a net gain for our technology lending book. Revenue and EBITDA growth across the portfolio remains in the mid- to high single digits range. We are seeing similarly strong fundamentals in our alternative credit portfolio and have been able to lean into opportunities created by market volatility and scarcity of liquidity.

In real assets, last 12-month gross returns were 12.3% for net lease, 13.4% for digital infrastructure and 6.4% for real estate credit. Our pipeline for deployment remains among the highest we've seen with over $140 billion of near-term opportunities across net lease and digital infrastructure. While in real estate credit, we leaned into the more volatile rate environment to deploy capital opportunistically at higher rates and wider spreads. Despite the higher rate environment, we continue to monetize at attractive spreads in net lease with realizations of $1.4 billion in the third quarter at a 100 basis point lower cap rate than entry levels on average, averaging an 18% net IRR and 1.5x MOIC on the sales made during the quarter.

In GP Strategic Capital, we have reached $11 billion raised for the latest vintage of our flagship large-cap strategy, inclusive of co-invest. Adding this to the capital raise from the strip sales we've completed, we've raised over $15 billion in total. DPI for the strategy remained top quartile with gross IRRs for Funds II, IV and V at 28%, 47% and 19% since inception.

Looking out at the rest of the year, there are a few items I'd like to call out. On management fee offsets, remember, the amortization related to our interval funds goes to 0 next quarter for credit and remains where it is for real assets. On stock-based compensation for business combination grants, remember, that goes to 0 starting next quarter, and we remain on track for approximately $365 million of stock-based comp other for the year. This sets us up for total stock-based compensation in 2027 to be lower than 2026. And we expect stock-based comp other to grow slower than revenue growth in 2027.

On transaction and other fees, we have been methodically building a capital markets function at Blue Owl. And this quarter, we saw some early successes translate into fees across a number of transactions in our real assets platform. While we would not run rate this third quarter amount, we're pleased with the early results we've seen, which include $85 million in credit and $68 million in real assets over the last 12 months. For the full year 2026, we remain confident on our ability to beat $1.02 of FRE per share and $0.89 of DE per share, as we noted on our last earnings call. Last quarter, we also said that we expected the growth rate for management fees to be higher in 2027 than in 2026, and that continues to be our expectation.

Finally, our DE per share of $0.24 for the third quarter surpassed our dividend of $0.23, and we expect to over-earn our dividend again in the fourth quarter. This is important to note as we have crossed the threshold to now over earning our dividend, and we expect to continue this for the year 2027 and forward. Wrapping it all up, this quarter, we continued to demonstrate the diversification, strong investment performance and core growth trends that we outlined last quarter, an inflection point we see in our business results. We're looking forward to wrapping up 2026 on strong footing and accelerating business momentum into 2027.

With that, why don't we jump into Q&A. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Operator, can we please open the line for questions?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question today comes from the line of Bill Katz from TD Cowen.

I did join a little bit late, so I apologize, you may have covered this. I think, Al, you were sort of wrapping this up a little bit in your comments. Can you talk a little bit about -- I appreciate the administrative fees, transaction revenue line could be a little bit on the high side, but it does sound like that's a bit of an emerging opportunity. Could you maybe unpack how you sort of see what might be normalized and how to think about that on a go-forward basis, particularly as you continue to scale out the real asset side of the business?

Bill, thanks for the question. Yes, this is something that we've been focused on for some time now. We continue to build out the capabilities of what we can do. You've seen this year, 1Q and 2Q elevated transaction fees when you compare it to last year. And this quarter, we did see a series of early successes that certainly contributed to this quarter's outperformance. We booked about 12 capital markets transactions in 3Q, which is up from 2 in the first quarter. There's no doubt I would expect 4Q to be a little quieter. I would look that back to 1Q and 2Q levels. But as we think about as we go here into 2027, we do expect the direction of travel to be up.

And going forward, as we get into '27, we do see growth and the ability for us to continue to build out our capabilities. It cuts across capital markets fees, transaction fees, structuring fees. We've always had strong structuring fees in the credit business, and you're going to see that ebb and flow a little driven by gross originations, but we continue to do interesting things there. And without a doubt, in real assets, that's where we've seen real growth this year and in particular, this quarter. So we do expect the direction of travel there to be up and to the right as we get into next year.

Your next question comes from Steven Chubak from Wolfe Research.

So I wanted to ask on the potential evolution of the IPI business. Our understanding is that the 4 IPI funds are primarily data center development funds. As these data centers enter their leasing period, the stabilized data centers offer a lower risk and lower return profile. And with that in mind, I wanted to gauge if there's any opportunity to roll out stabilized data center funds on the platform? The public REIT is one version of that evolution. Those have done well in the public markets. Or do you sense any appetite from LPs for dedicated stabilized data center funds that you could spin out of the existing funds on the platform today?

Thank you. And it's certainly a focal topic. And let me like start with the premise predicate. These data centers stabilized with these very high-quality counterparties are really special assets. And over the course of time, we think are going to prove to be even more kind of notably special because of the ability to develop, which we have pretty distinctively in partnership at really attractive rates for us. And then as you said, once stabilized, they have a very substantial potential upside.

So we absolutely see opportunities both in growing businesses we operate. And as you said, there's both public and private approaches to that. It also, of course, speaks to the opportunity, and most importantly, for the people that have already invested in those funds or in in future funds that we do, this is yet another way for them to get significant upside. You've seen it in the performance, for example, of over time, our triple net lease business. And let's remember, these are a very, very large and a more technically complex version of triple net lease, the way we do it. And I think it's an important observation more generally. What we're really doing is something that has been done from our legacy business and today for 17 years, which is work with corporations and a really trusted partner, generate, therefore, attractive entry points for assets. And over time, one can earn attractive yields and there's capital upside.

As Alan noted in our comments, even in this environment, even with rates where they were going and the activity in rates, we sold assets from triple net in this last quarter at 100 basis point compression to even where we entered them and generated an 18% return. So you're on to a very important theme, which we think is going to be really beneficial for investors in our products where there's exposure to data centers, whether those are development or frankly, even just taking assets at attractive prices from people's balance sheets. And over time, will allow us to establish additional businesses and pools of capital that are the homes for those pretty special assets.

Your next question comes from the line of Devin Ryan from Citizens Bank.

A question on some of the commentary on real estate credit. It sounded like you're seeing more demand there than ever. It sounds like the terms are more favorable than you've seen in a long time. So it would be great to just unpack that a little bit more and get a sense of kind of how that pipeline is developing, if you can maybe quantify anything you're seeing there and kind of where you're seeing new loans pricing relative to a couple of quarters ago?

And then just more broadly, as we think about Blue Owl's positioning, kind of how you feel like you're maybe better positioned to lean in relative to where traditional lenders are obviously constrained here. So I appreciate some color there.

Absolutely. It is an important area of growth. And most importantly, it's an important opportunity for our LPs. I think we all appreciate the challenges that the real estate asset class at large is facing in light of a lot of financings and purchases that were made in 0 rate environments. We sit in a pretty fortunate place, which is that's not the business that we've been in. So we don't have those assets in the same fashion where you've got re-leasing going on and you have to then do refinancings.

So let's just start with the predicate that in many cases, people are going to be on the, call it, the other side of this, which is they're the ones seeking the need for refinancing. We, on the other hand, of course, as you know, have a deep long history in strategies generally that are about downside protection and, of course, credit in particular. And we have both participated in, if you think about our PRIMA business, that single asset, single borrower business and now increasingly our own dedicated real estate credit products that are more general kind of call it more opportunistic. We see a tremendous opportunity to participate by inserting ourselves into the kind of the most interesting part in these capital structures. This refinancing wave in real estate is -- it's here, it's coming, and that's going to create opportunity for us to deploy.

We're seeing a very significant backlog of opportunities, a very significant pipeline. We absolutely like the risk reward on what we're seeing. I would kind of call it a -- for lack of a better term, frankly, it's a buyer's market, given the nature of the supply, the need for capital versus what's available. So we're pretty pleased with where that opportunity stands, and we've already started to create dedicated pools of capital for that purpose. And I think that's going to be another one of those areas of meaningful growth for us over time.

Your next question comes from the line of Glenn Schorr from Evercore ISI.

I want to dig a little deeper on GP stakes, GP Capital Strategic Capital. So harder IPO backdrop. I'm not expecting a lot of monetizations on that front, but -- and M&A is always a little tricky. So curious for an overview of where LP interest is for fundraising on your side, where GP interest is in terms of selling stakes? And then you talked a little bit about the liquidity events that you've produced, but maybe you could expand a little bit more on that? Now that valuations have come in on the public side.

Sure. Why don't I take a first shot at that, Glenn. Thank you for the question. We -- just to pull the lens back a little, we've raised about $11 billion in the flagship and co-invest dollars and about $4.5 billion of that -- in addition, $4.5 billion in strip sales. So in total, we've raised over $15 billion in this area. The $4.5 billion of strip sales has helped us to give and distribute out the $4.5 billion to LPs across our GP stakes vintages over the past 2-plus years.

So we continue to see interest from the LP community. We will look to wrap up fundraising end of this year. Some may slip into early next year in 1Q, but we continue to have good dialogues with LPs. We continue to raise dollars each quarter as we go here, and we're coming up to the final stretch in terms of fundraising. I think also this is one of the strengths of the GP stakes platform we have, which is we have a wide portfolio of market-leading businesses, and they're exposed to different sectors. But a couple of things worth observing.

One, I think we all can observe in this market and not just this current market. I mean the overall trend is the big get bigger. And our focus within the stakes products are the bigger funds and bigger platforms. So while pacing for anybody's funds might indeed be slower than it would have been expected or hoped for a few years ago, at the end of the day, the big ones are prevailing, and that's who our partners are. Now more specifically, this is, I think, an important note also. We have significant exposure to GPs, for example, that are in energy, that are in tech growth. They're thriving. So it's a little bit, and I think this will apply to a lot of things we all talk about, especially in businesses where we're talking about protecting your downside and earning a really attractive return. The diversification and the nature of the assets you buy, energy businesses and tech growth businesses are having great success fundraising and great success with monetization.

In fact, in energy, been how long since we've seen that kind of activity in those sectors. So those are real bright spots. So when you put that all together into a set of leading firms like we have, it leads to a very attractive aggregate result. And remember, one of the great attributes of GP stakes, which we have demonstrated over many, many years is the ability to generate current income, cash flow and return even separate from principal return. And DPI is particularly where our products stand out. DPI is particularly what's missing in the market today. So I think we actually offer something pretty special in this, let's call it, broadly defined arena of private equity.

Could I just follow up real quick on that because I think it's interesting. The $4.5 billion in strip sales that you've generated, that is good DPI. I'm curious, how much of that are they pocketing because it's offsetting some deficiencies somewhere else in their portfolio or versus how much of that is being deployed back into your subsequent funds?

We certainly are seeing some of that come back into our existing funds, Glenn, into our fundraise totals.

Your next question comes from the line of Craig Siegenthaler from Bank of America.

Our question is on the institutional channel. Inflows were quite large this quarter and also broad-based. Beyond this quarter, how is momentum looking in that channel into 4Q and heading in 2027? And what specific strategies or client types do you expect to see the biggest driver of inflows?

Craig, thanks for the question. On last quarter's call, we certainly talked about having dialogues with large institutions across a number of areas, but in particular, on credit. And we had talked about making good progress there. And certainly, over the years, we've talked about it takes time to execute on some of these large institutional partnerships. It could take months, it could take quarters, it could take years with some of these. We're not focused on the timing to get them closed. We need to get them right, and we follow the pace that the institution wants to set. And so you'll definitely see this ebb and flow over time.

Two interesting statistics maybe to share, and then I'll get into why we're seeing such strong support from institutions. On a year-to-date basis, 9-months ended versus year-to-date 9 months ended last year, we're at 90% of where we were last year, which considering the narratives that we've kind of walked through this year, that's pretty good. That's pretty interesting. On an LTM basis, year-over-year, so LTM ended September 30, '26, we're basically flat. So this past LTM through September 30, '26, we raised almost $39 billion and the previous LTM was $39.5 billion -- so why do we continue to see strong support from institutions? It continues to be a recognition, we think, of two important trends that we've been seeing in the institutional market. So first, we continue to see an increasing desire for institutions to identify a handful of managers to build large-scale partnerships. More and more of these institutions recognize that larger partnerships offer better economies of scale, obviously. They offer the ability to access key opportunities across private asset classes with one firm and to navigate different investment environments collaboratively and successfully as partners rather than just passive investors in funds. And that's what we offer to our institutional investors.

Blue Owl is one of the few managers that has capabilities across the entire private markets universe. So -- and second, all asset classes, including private markets, are facing a tougher macroeconomic backdrop. And we're seeing institutions are definitely seeing the performance dispersion, and they're anticipating that dispersion is going to continue to grow over time. We think they recognize that certain strategies and sectors in the market will certainly better withstand a rising rate and a higher inflationary environment. And so they're prioritizing capital towards investment strategies that focus on capital preservation and income generation rather than purely capital appreciation. And these have been the cornerstone of all of our products, capital preservation and income generation and matches really well with the current environment and the future investment as we see going forward. And at the beginning and end of the day, it always starts and stops with investment performance, and our investment performance continues to deliver strong returns for our LPs.

Yes. I just want to amplify that last point. Job one is always to deliver the best results for the people who have trusted their capital to us. And this has been something that wherever the narratives have gone over time, we've always kept a vigilant eye on the thing that we really need to deliver to folks. And it's showing.

If you take a look at direct loan -- our direct lending appreciation this year -- this quarter, 3.9%, all credit, 2.9%. Net lease, 3%; digital infrastructure, 5.6%. And that's leading to following that same list for the year LTM 9%, 10%, 12%, 13% roughly. So these are really good results in an environment, as Alan just said, I think we can all conclude is a place where it looks pretty different from what people thought a year ago. Rates are higher. generally speaking, from what we do, spreads are higher, performance remains very strong in things like credit. And -- but there are clouds on the horizon. There are uncertainties. And I think institutions are saying, "Hey, look, that's a really interesting time to do what Blue Owl does kind of across its entire platform, which is present those sorts of strategies that Alan talked about that focus on risk management and downside protection with strong risk-adjusted returns. So the institutions, I think, are, if you will, voting with their feet. It also reflects a lot of time invested in over years now, and we're seeing the benefits and Alan referred to kind of the inflection some of this drives, a very, very broad and robust institutional fundraising platform, a broad and robust wealth fundraising platform and actually a young but growing insurance platform.

So we feel very fortunate that people have entrusted us with that capital and I think, seeing the flows in institution this year, this quarter, we see that as an indication more of evolution and development of the platform, not something one-off.

Your next question comes from the line of Brennan Hawken from BMO Capital Markets.

I had a question on deployment. So you spoke to the attractive deployment opportunity in Net Lease and Digital, but I was hoping to hone in on Direct Lending. We saw a negative net deployment here this quarter. So could you speak to what you're seeing today, but maybe more importantly, the path to getting that number positive and more contributing in a meaningful way on a go-forward basis?

Absolutely. I'm going to -- let me cover it -- let me unpack it and then Alan is going to provide a couple of numbers to go with it. I think like many things, actually, we have to kind of decompose. So to your point about net deployment, net deployment was modestly negative this quarter. But there's two components to deployment, right? There is how much we invest out, and we're never going to push that beyond what we see as great opportunities with great risk reward. And then there's what gets paid back. And actually, in this case, both grew quite substantially. And Alan will give you those numbers in a moment.

But I think it's quite important to unpack that. We actually saw significant growth in gross originations. Gross originations went to $5.2 billion this quarter. But importantly, we ended up with repayments of $4.7 billion. I might note repayments happen at hundred on a dollar on the dollar. So actually, this was a very, very healthy quarter. We actually increased our deployments meaningfully, just people keep paying us back successfully on our prior loans at $0.100, which, by the way, allows it to get redeployed into a higher spread environment and one where you're deploying new loans with all the information we have today about the economy and businesses and AI. So I would actually look at that well, net, it may not have moved the deployment needle. What it really did though is meaningfully change the continued complexion by bringing repayments of prior loans and meaningful increase in deployments of new loans. Until there's a more robust M&A environment, I don't think one would logically expect there to be rapid net deployment.

The M&A environment will come. We've said this for all year. We've been cautious about anticipating that return. We're not really sure what indications people would have that would lead them to think it's right around the corner, but it is somewhere around the corner. And when that happens, then probably both those numbers are going to accelerate. But in particular, the gross originations will probably accelerate more rapidly. So I think we actually really like what we saw this quarter, pretty darn healthy for the portfolio and actually indicates there's even more to do despite the absence of a meaningful M&A environment, we actually had a meaningful step-up in gross originations.

I'll pull the lens back a little more than that. We're seeing, as Mark pointed out, about a 45% increase in gross deployment in direct lending. We're seeing ongoing strong opportunities for deployment in alternative credit IG credit. We certainly have a huge pipeline of opportunities in net lease and digital infrastructure. And focusing in on net lease for a moment, I talked a little bit about that last quarter as it related to capital calls and management fee growth. We see coming up for Net Lease VI and the current vintage that we're fundraising for between now, really end of this quarter and into the first quarter, we could see line of sight to $2 billion to $2.5 billion of capital calls across those 2 products by the time we get to the end of 1Q. That would bring Fund VI fully deployed and the current vintage to approaching 25% drawn and deployed. So continue to see really active pipeline and projects moving along well.

Your next question comes from the line of Patrick Davitt from Autonomous Research.

I have a clarification on your answer to Craig's question. Last quarter, you mentioned you had some potentially large credit SMAs in the pipe. And I think your answer suggests those did not contribute in 3Q, so still on the come. Is that what you're saying?

No. Sorry, Patrick, apologies for that. I was pointing to, we were calling out last quarter that we had been working on a series of large institutions, some for a little bit of time, some for a long time, and a lot came together in 3Q to come up with the raise that we did.

Got it. Okay. Are there -- is there still more to come? Or is that kind of the slug?

So well, there's always more to come without a doubt. We continue to see strong support from institutions. Last quarter, I had made the comment that we think the second half of the year could be a little stronger than the first half of the year, and we still continue to see that playing out. You should not expect a similar quarter in 4Q, but we're really encouraged by all the discussions we're having across the institutional landscape and are excited to get into '27 and have another strong year.

Your next question comes from the line of Crispin Love with Piper Sandler.

During the quarter, Doug made a comment on an FP panel in London talking about needing more insurance capital. Can you just expand on that a bit? Would you view growth here as organic, inorganic? Is the Voya mandate a key example of this? And then would you ever change the strategy to get more balance sheet intensive on the insurance side?

Sure. Thanks, Crispin. Maybe to start with where we are today. We manage about over $40 billion of AUM for our insurance clients. Year-to-date this year, we've raised over $7 billion of new commitments from our insurance clients across investment strategies. So we continue to see a really strong pipeline of organic growth coming through our insurance solutions world.

Reminder, we're an independent platform. We don't run or manage an insurance business. And our insurance clients and prospective clients, they like that. We know insurance companies value assets with steady levels of high cash flow that are capital efficient. And that's where we're seeing the highest demand from insurers. Blue Owl is very well built for insurance clients. We have strategies that cut across each platform that are very interesting to insurers from direct lending, all credit, IG credit over to real assets, net lease, digital infrastructure, real estate credit, including GP stakes, a lot of insurance support from the strip sales that we've been doing there. And all of these strategies are income producing that produces high cash flow for insurers. And that's what they're really looking for. And we have the deal flow that is very interesting to them. So we do think over the next few years, we can grow a lot here.

I'll just add to kind of set the stage there. What Doug was really driving at is while it's been a successful part of our business, clearly, we are kind of under market share on that opportunity. And I say that for a couple of reasons. One, we can just make the comparative observation, but more to the point, we originate vast amounts of opportunities that, in many cases, today, we don't have the home for. So we're kind of long the issue, long the opportunity that most people are seeking. And so pairing that with the right both pools of capital and partners is a mutual opportunity.

So just take, for example, the SpaceX chip financing, we're part of that. We have a wonderful long relationship with SpaceX. We love doing business with them. But today, we don't have the scale of pools of capital large enough or frankly, put another way, we could meet a lot more demand for that opportunity and as we develop these partnerships. So I think [indiscernible] point also was, look, we do see a real -- there's obviously a logical convergence, and we've all seen it between insurance and private asset management. But there's still a lot of room for evolution of that business model. There's one version, which is client and provider. There's one version where an asset manager absorbs an insurance company and really the insurance company is sort of a feeder to the business. And then there's ways to align the best of the insurance business, people that are really good at a very complex business with people that are really good at the right kinds of private assets. That area three, is where we see real opportunity ahead.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Blostein from Goldman Sachs.

I wanted to double-click on some of the dynamics in the Evergreen channel, particularly looking at your [indiscernible] product, the digital infra for retail. A little bit more noisy in the last few months just generally with headlines, you saw Oracle, you saw a couple of other things out there and just a little bit more debate on the trajectory of the AI theme. How does that impact, if at all, sort of the appetite from the retail channel for this product? Maybe just an update on how you're seeing both distribution and ultimately sales evolve here over the next few months?

Let me start off and then I think Alan can add some additional color. So the digital infrastructure opportunity, we talked about this a little bit earlier, is really both in scale and kind of nature of the risk reward the way we come at it, very compelling. And institutions have certainly long figured that out, and I think the results demonstrate those are good choices. Now we have a platform, which, by the way, and now we get into this, it's quite scaled for something that's a pretty young product.

However, we are in the early stages. We have a wide -- we are certainly very focused on the broadening of that distribution. And also, I think there's a little bit of a conflation that requires some clarification because today, unfortunately, people have somehow turned the word data center generically into a question mark as opposed to the tremendous opportunity done right that it presents. This is not a data center fund. It's a digital infrastructure fund working with extremely high-quality counter-parties. And I recall the earlier question about the opportunity for stabilized data centers. Well, there's a tremendous need to form the pools of capital for stabilized data centers. And frankly, already is one of those pools of capital. So we see this as one of the big opportunities. You just think about what has to be built to support just cloud compute, like let's not even get into the world of AI and debates about the cutting edge of that question.

Cloud compute is growing rapidly. And the majority of the data centers, for example, that we have do cloud compute, but it's with the same wonderful high-quality customers. So I think we all see this as a huge growing market power. I mean there's another set of assets that can live very comfortably inside of the digital infrastructure platform. fiber. We've done work in fiber that's all part of that digital infrastructure platform. So [indiscernible], we see as one of those really interesting products going forward. You've seen the interest in the wealth channel in infrastructure. Well, this is a very interesting and especially positioned kind of infrastructure.

And the only thing I would add there is [indiscernible] is $4.6 billion. We've only been up and running a year. So we are seeing good success there. We definitely want to broaden the platforms we're on, and that's all been underway and continues to move along.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Brown with UBS.

I wanted to ask maybe another question on the digital infrastructure side, specifically for [indiscernible] IV. Maybe just update us on your expectations there. And I guess just given the amount of capital being raised across the digital infrastructure theme and the AI theme, there's more concentration there across institutional investors. Have you noticed any hesitation around allocations? -- maybe how you're thinking about the ultimate size of that fund relative to the prior vintage and the duration of that fund raise? Will some of that growth in concentration kind of extend that fundraise? And then as you -- there's obviously a lot of political pushback on some of these new data center build, does that kind of represent a bit of a challenge for deployment for you guys?

So I'll take that, Mike. On the last point from a deployment perspective, we have a huge pipeline. So we're really excited on the pipeline side. And look, there's obviously been a lot of attention on data centers recently. So just to start with, we have some very unique capabilities in this area. As we've talked about over the last number of calls. We have over 130 data centers that are operational or under construction, and that represents almost 14 gigawatts of leased and owned capacity. We have a 21-gigawatt pipeline. So to go back to that pipeline, we have a very, very robust pipeline there.

And to level set, I think one -- there's two important things. One, the amount of compute that people utilize is not going down in our view, and I think everyone shares that view. And Mark touched on this a minute ago, but I'll do a little more directly. We're not making a bet on AI when we invest in data centers. What we're doing is very simple. We're buying or building buildings for investment-grade tenants and signing long-term leases, period. We're taking Microsoft, Amazon, Meta credit risk. Now rolling into where we are for our next vintage, we're doing -- no pun intended, we're doing rolling closes for our first close, so through the end of 1Q, and that provides flexibility for our institutional investors to either use their '26 allocation to invest or they can use their 2027 allocation. And not dissimilar to other fundraisers, this will be an 18- to 24-month fundraise likely through, call it, mid-2028. We're very excited about what we can do here. And in particular, as I just commented, we're excited about the investment opportunities we're seeing in the market for our LPs. $10 billion continues to be the overall fundraise goal here.

So I think I just also want to amplify something here, which is back to this earlier comment. The term data centers, it gets used either too generically or too monolithically. There's a lot of different kinds of data centers. And we focus on and frankly, are one of the core go-tos in a very particular kind, which is very large-scale data centers for the largest hyperscalers in the world under long-term leases. That's where we thrive.

We have, as you know, a specialized group in [indiscernible] and [indiscernible], where we have well over 1,000 people in order to be able to implement what are these very, very large complex projects. That makes us a very specially positioned firm, which is why we're one of the largest landlords to many of those hyperscalers. But that partnership has real value. There's not many people that can do that. And so origination at its heart, married with capital is where we're able to create these very special opportunities, which I think over the course of time are going to look that much more special. So I think it's important to keep unpacking this question. It's one thing to take a data center that's got unleased capacity or in 5 years is going to have to release. That may be a perfectly fine strategy, but it's not what we do. And when we think about capital formation, actually, our backlog is between our triple net lease and digital infrastructure, it's as large as we've ever had.

So this question of demand and supply, there's no doubt in our minds, the demand is really substantial. I'm not so sure about the predicate this notion that there's a lot of supply of capital. In fact, a lot of the behavior recently has probably spooked some of the capital in terms of its involvement. So I'm not so sure that the capital base, in fact, I'd say it's safe to say when you think of the scale of what has to be invested, we've all seen this over just the last handful of weeks, scale of capital that's been needed and coming out of now the private markets seems to be expanding rapidly, not the other direction. So I think we feel really, really good about this business. And for the foreseeable future, I think we're in the right place with a very distinctive capability.

Your next question comes from the line of Chris Kotowski from Oppenheimer.

My question is also about data centers, and it's probably unanswerable on an earnings call, and I'd encourage you to do a teach-in on this sometime. But there was a -- I'm trying to reconcile the scale of the stories of what you said about STACK and the stories we read in the news sources. So like there was a Bloomberg article in the recent quarter that said you're considering a $20 billion to $25 billion sale on an Asia Pacific data center. And I don't expect you to confirm or deny that. But the entire invested capital in the most recent fund was just $5.3 billion, and we hear these numbers of $20 billion to $25 billion. So how -- can you reconcile for us how do these numbers fit together?

And if, for example, that data center sale that Bloomberg talked about went through on the terms that they discussed, what would the impact of that be on your financials, your fundraising, distribution? And where would we see it in your financials?

So thank you for the question. And I mean, as obviously observe, we can't comment on stories in the market. But what I think we can all observe, and this goes back again to a couple of stitching together a couple of the questions already. The demand for high-quality stabilized assets is really substantial. And I would dare say for good reason because the nature of these assets, where do you get 20-year kinds of assets with rent escalators, with companies that have, in many cases, the biggest companies in the world, that's a very valuable and at the end of the day, scarce asset.

And so your question, I think, anchors to an important point, which is there is a significant opportunity, we believe, for monetization and in some cases, monetization at compelling -- very compelling prices. So we think of all of that as the right tail, but the beauty of the strategy is things like that, if they were to prove true, would be tremendous upside. But you don't need those upsides to end up earning a really, really attractive return. That's the hallmark of a Blue Owl strategy.

Okay. Just as a follow-up on that. I mean, if I think about a typical private equity fund, right, you're going to write 20 to 25 major equity checks, right? So a $5.3 billion fund, that would be like $203 million equity checks at the time of origination. Am I thinking about that right? Or are they just much bigger and chunkier than that?

Yes. They're bigger and chunkier. Remember, it's -- I mean, of course, I know you know us but to say it's not a PE fund. This is an infrastructure product or a real estate product, however you want to think about it, but under very long-term leases. So it's not about -- it's a different measure of diversification.

You're having 20 different projects isn't really the key question. It's getting a good mix of different projects at different time lines with -- there's a handful of great companies that pay their bills. So no, the checks are larger. Of course, it does also lead to interesting co-investment opportunities. It also leads to, again, the earlier question, the opportunity for things like [indiscernible] because all of these projects are way beyond as you're talking about the scale of anything people have normally contemplated in the land or private equity.

I mean just think about any given project, a single gigawatt is probably just -- this is just the digital infrastructure part, not the chip part, is probably depending on where you're building it and the exact facts is probably $15 billion. And frankly, if anything, today, the debt markets are probably softening a bit on leverage level. So that increases the equity demand. And to the degree that we see debt costs for things like digital infrastructure rise, then we expect fully that the equity returns will rise in proportion with them. So there's a lot to like about the dynamic if you occupy one of a few special places where you have the proven ability to deliver. Capital alone isn't an answer here. Capital married with skills and access. And by the way, people mentioned earlier, the political issues, it's very complex. There's a very, very local issue. That takes a local ground game. Again, something that people need in partnership with someone like us. It isn't just a check.

Your next question comes from the line of Wilma Burdis from William -- sorry, Raymond James.

Great color on the data center business, which we understand is extremely strong. How are you all thinking about the opportunity to finance chips or GPUs? That's going to be a huge market in the coming years. Just curious if there's any take on that.

Absolutely. Great question and indeed, a very attractive area, very different. So back to the point about when we talk about AI or we talk about digital infrastructure, I think we have to keep unpacking it just the way you did. A chip financing is very, very different from a data center financing. Data centers are extremely long-lived assets the way we're doing them, right? It's that infrastructure surround, it's the physical asset with very long lives.

I mean, anecdotally, we still own a data center that was originally an AOL data center, and it's still occupied, leased and paying rent. So these assets have a very different lifespan. Chips have a lot of technology risk. Chips, therefore, have a very much much -- by definition, have a much shorter lifespan, and they require a very different kind of structuring, different duration. So one ought not to conflate the two. They're very different kinds of risk return profiles. That said, it's an enormous opportunity. And even there, we have to parse apart. There's IG solutions like what we've done with SpaceX. By the way, we had done that originally with XAI and rolled into SpaceX. We actually have done chips a couple of times in the SpaceX complex. We did it this quarter, as you saw, though, on the other hand, say, like an IRE, fantastic company. takes technical structuring, but you can structure these things very intelligently and you can create very, very good risk management, something we're very skilled at. But we are not confuse the two. And that, for example, is a great kind of financing for our credit business.

So I think all these things, again, this tendency to lump them into one word, for us, it's unpacking it, getting the risk reward right and finding the right matching home, and we have homes for all these different types of financing. But you got to look at financings for chips in a very different lens from the lens you look at something like a triple net lease real estate asset. That's our job. Obviously, it's what we do. But I think even when people think about asset allocation and think about the opportunity set, chip financing is probably oftentimes a 3-year financing, right, versus a real estate asset, triple net lease asset, probably starts at oftentimes close to 20 years, and then there's extensions. So very, very different ways to participate in the digital transformation, but both very compelling.

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Weldon from Wells Fargo.

Wonder if we could circle back and just talk about sort of the signs of falling in the redemption queues for the BDCs, sort of any investors sort of dropping out of the queues and also the feedback that you're hearing lately from the wire houses and RA home offices. I'd also just note, I think it's interesting and kind of constructive that I'm circling up on this topic at the very end of the call. It's a change in focus here.

I made the same mental note.

Agrred, Dan. I'll take that. Good question. and glad to see it towards the back of the queue, which is really in line with what we're seeing here. So we are definitely seeing encouraging signs that point to increased growth in '27. So I'm going to break this down in a couple of different ways. One, -- and again, I said this earlier, it starts and stops with this. We're seeing really strong performance for all of our flagship wealth funds, right? So through the end of September on a year-to-date annualized basis, we're running at 7% to 12% net returns. And remember, our products are typically -- I touched on this earlier, typically fixed income replacement. And the [indiscernible] bond index is down year-to-date.

I think it's down about 4% through yesterday. And so product like CIC annualized year-to-date 7% LCX, ORENT, both 10%. OdI, we had a question earlier on [indiscernible], 12% year-to-date annualized returns. And so on the signs that we're seeing of re-acceleration in the wealth business, we're seeing sales are modestly up in 3Q, which is typically a slower time of the year given the summer holidays. We're seeing leading indicators that are positive. They're pointing up. And so what we're seeing and hearing specifically there, increased activity with home offices around product launches. And there's an emphasis in these product launches on expanding from direct lending into ABF and real assets, where sentiment is stronger, especially outside the U.S. We're seeing an increase in both new producing FAs in 3Q, which is up about 13% from 2Q. And FA cross-selling, I touched on this stat last quarter in Q&A, similar -- same number as last quarter, FAs that invested in our products during 3Q, 74% of them are in more than one our product.

So all of that combined with we're seeing increased activity in terms of client engagement, meetings, conferences, pickups in kit orders, indications of interest. We have a strong pipeline of new initiatives and products for '27, particularly around things like models, multi-asset solutions, tax [indiscernible] solutions like the 1031 product we have. We've seen enormous success in that 1031 product as part of ORENT and equity-oriented products. And don't forget, we raise a lot of wealth dollars across our closed-end funds and other vehicles. So think about the net lease franchises, the digital infrastructure, the GP stakes franchises, we raise a lot of wealth dollars across those closed-end vehicles as well. So really anchoring back to what we're designed to do, which is to provide consistent income, protect NAV and compound wealth.

Remember, we have a scaled team with embedded global relationships. Only a few firms have invested in that kind of capability, and it's the foundation that we can build off as we get into 2027. And so at the end of the day, our suite of products are delivering across the board from a performance perspective. And the market is showing more and more dispersion in returns. We touched on that earlier as well. So all of this really does give us, Dan, a lot of confidence in a reacceleration of flows in the wealth business and continued declines of redemption requests.

Your final question comes from the line of Benjamin Budish from Barclays.

Alan, I don't think you commented on the FRE margin expectations for the year, although I got the sense it was relatively unchanged. I think that implies a little bit of a seasonal step-up in Q4, which we didn't see last year, but we've seen typically. So curious if there's any sort of near-term color you can provide. And then as you think into 2027, presumably, you'll maybe talk about that a bit more on the next call. But how should we think about the run rate? I mean, should we think with revenues accelerating, can you sort of sustain this maybe like lower -- more mid-single-digit pace of expense growth? How should we think about leverage going into the next year?

Sure. Ben, I appreciate it. Thank you for the question. I'm going to unpack that a couple of ways. One, on FRE margins. Year-to-date, we're at 58.6%. -- it's above the guide of 58.5%. We could experience a little more margin expansion than the guide that I've given of 58.5%. And frankly, we're expecting that. It's our new base case. So we would expect a modest spike in 4Q in margins again this year. And we would expect modest margin expansion in '27 as well. So what's underpinning all that?

I commented on the prepared remarks about management fee growth in '27 being higher than '26. So we are seeing an acceleration into '27 for management fees. We're seeing it for revenues. We're seeing it for FRE per share. We're seeing it for DE per share. We certainly -- and I think everyone has seen this certainly today and over the last number of quarters, we have more diversified management fee and revenue streams than we've ever had heading into 2027. We're seeing tailwinds for Part 1 fees with rates higher, the management fee offset in credit is gone in '27. That was $20 million of offsets in 2026. So that's gone in '27 for credit, not for real assets, but certainly for credit. I just commented trends in traded -- non-traded BDCs are getting better. We've raised a lot of capital in '26. And just the annualization of that will drive some growth. We touched on the $36 billion of AUM not yet earning fees, and that's a backlog of $400 million of management fees. So we're excited about all those things, and we're really excited about the products that we have in market, so both now and coming in '27. I'm going to break that out with first products that we have existing strategies for BOSE.

So we're excited to get out next year with the second vintage of our BOSE product. We raised $3 billion for that strategy. It's our GP-led secondary strategy. Very strong track record there that we've built, and we're excited to bring that second vintage to market next year. We just closed a final close this quarter on European net lease first fund. over expectations, USD 1.8 billion raised there. We're expecting to bring Vintage 2 to the market next year. We're expecting to build on the success of the first vintage, and we'll be out in market next year with that. Mark touched on earlier, real estate credit, data center credit continue to track, hitting or exceeding fundraising goals there. Opportunistic alt credit.

So a lot happening in alternative credit, very strong growth rates there, 30-plus percent management fee growth on an LTM basis. Very successful ASOF IX fundraise exceeded our fundraising goals. We commented, I think in 1Q, we wrapped up fundraising there. We expect to be in market with the next vintage for our opportunistic alt credit product. And then wrapping up credit, health care royalties and life sciences credit. We're focused on raising about $1 billion by the end of this year. We're about halfway through that goal and have line of sight to the finish line. So excited about getting out with that. There's some new launches that we've talked a little bit about on prior calls. So credit secondaries certainly has been on the list. We've been out talking to folks, prospective LPs looking to do a first close the first half of 2027.

And then we've talked about diversified direct lending, having a closed-end product there. We have a very strong track record, and we're excited about bringing something out to market with a product like that as well. Wealth dedicated products, we certainly look -- are going to look to add to our lineup of wealth-dedicated products in '27. And so we've talked about our focus in the past on meaningfully increasing the number of flagship funds we have in market. And that in a few years, we should have double, maybe more the amount of large fundraises in the market. And so all of these things, just pulling the lens back, everything I just talked to really gives us a lot of confidence in accelerating growth into '27 and frankly, beyond.

And that ends our question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Marc Lipschultz for closing remarks.

Great. Just going to offer a kind of pullback in summary here because there's a lot, obviously, that we covered and a lot going on in the marketplace. Fund managers talk a lot about DPI, which in industry terms is the return of principal and gains to fund investors. It's a measure of how your fund is doing from a cash flow perspective. Our funds do very well on that measure, and it's really important to our LPs. So we definitely talk about it. But we also talk about DPI at the Blue Owl level. And that's in two ways.

First, we have a very high return of capital to our shareholders as measured by the attractive dividend we pay. And that's been a big part of total return over the past couple of years as well. But secondly, we think there's another DPI acronym that really encapsulates what we talked about today and what we're really seeing in the business, and that's diversification, performance and inflection -- diversification, the business is far more diversified than perhaps people perceived certainly than it was if we go back a few years. And in fact, we just listen to Alan's comment, that list of different strategies, all of which live very comfortably in the Blue Owl DNA, all places where we have the ability and have been able to deliver successfully for people give us a lot of different ways to continue to meet the needs of our LPs and grow Blue Owl successfully and on an ever more accelerated basis.

Performance. Look, this is ultimately the key to our success, and our strategies continue to perform well. We talked about that on the call, and that drives the flywheel. Investors are seeing the results and not only industry results, which are good, but we're also seeing differentiation that's thankfully showing in our favor in many cases. So performance will always be the heart and soul, and there, we're showing and shining brightly. And then inflection. -- look, we're putting the first part of the year in the rearview mirror and demonstrating an acceleration of growth in the second half, and we see that continuing into 2027. So DPI put that way, diversification performance inflection is probably our hallmark and our calling card, and we'll keep talking about it with you. Thank you.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Welcome to our next session here. If any of you don't know me, I'm Ben Budish. I cover the U.S. brokers, asset managers and exchanges. And for this next fireside from Blue Owl, we've got Doug Ostrover, Co-CEO and Chairman. Doug, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.

As am I. Doug It's been a little while since this audience has heard from you. I'm excited to have you here today. Can you give us your view of Blue Owl today, just a state of the world in your universe just to kind of level set as we get started?

Sure. So first of all, thanks, everybody, for spending a little time with us this morning. I'll try not to dwell on this too long because I could use 30 minutes to describe it. But so for those who are not familiar with us, Blue Owl, $320 billion alternative asset manager. We went public about 5.5 years ago, around $60 billion. So we've had about 5 turns of growth over the last, let's call it, 5.5 years.

We're pretty narrowly focused, and that's by design. When we started the firm, we really were focused on let's find areas where demand is greater than supply, meaning demand for capital, and we can come in and fill that void. And let's go after things where the asset class is high current income, good downside protection. That's really what we wanted to do, and that's what we've largely achieved.

We have three areas. The biggest area for us is credit, but it's not credit the way all of you would think about it. About 1/3 of our capital of the firm is in traditional direct lending. The other 15% is in asset-backed lending and a little investment grade. The second biggest area, which is our fastest-growing area is our real assets business. We have two lines of business there. We have triple net lease, and we have data centers, and I'll touch on each of these in a moment.

And then the third leg of the stool is GP stakes. If you look across the board at all of these businesses, and there are sub lines of business underneath them, we've had top quartile and in many cases, top decile performance. The GP stakes business, we are by far the market leader. And for those who are not familiar with it, GP stakes is where we go. We take an ownership stake in a leading alternative asset manager. The capital is very long dated. We have no pressure like traditional private equity to sell that. We were just voted as the #1 PE firm globally. It's had well in excess of 20% returns and a very high DPI.

In our real assets business, which I'm sure we'll spend time talking about, that by far is our fastest-growing business. I mentioned triple net lease. Triple net lease is where we go. We buy a mission-critical asset from an investment-grade counterparty, and we lease it back for upwards of 20 years. We bought that business under 5 years ago. We've grown it almost fivefold. Again, in excess of 20% returns and really good DPI. Our data center business, we have a 1,000-person team in that space. We've been at it for in excess of 10 years. We own and operate in excess of 140 facilities, about 15 gigawatts of capacity makes us one of the largest players and globally there.

And then in credit, as I mentioned, we have our direct lending business, our asset-based business, asset-based, we bought a few years ago, generating today 13% in like our core fund, close to 20% opportunistic.

And then our credit business, which I'm sure we'll get into today, despite all the rhetoric in the press over the last 6 months, to give you an idea, credit has generated well in excess of 9% versus the leveraged loan index of 6% and the high-yield market, which is close to 4%. I guess if I could leave you with just two thoughts about the business since we're in conference season, I haven't been up here for a while. One, the business is much more diversified than people realize and what they've been writing about. Secondly, if I took you back to the beginning, 5.5 years ago, how we described our business, we are 100% of our revenue is from management fee. None of our peers have that, not quite 100%, let's call it, 98%. Carry, the bulk of it goes to the teams. We take the management fee, we pay that out. We create -- I believe what we've created is really an annuity stream for our investors.

And so when I come in with my co-CEO, Marc Lipschultz, the beginning of '27, we're looking at the year ahead, we can look back at '26 and say, okay, we know what we earned in '26. We know we have tens of billions of dollars we've raised. And when that's deployed, we'll earn fees. So what's our deployment going to be? But the next two variables are key. Where are margins going to be? Alan has been very clear. I think we've talked about 58% and change, let's call it, 58.5%, and we're trying to take that up slowly every year. But then the big variable on this annuity stream is what's our growth rate. And given all the press this year, as you can imagine, growth has come down a little bit.

But the question, I think, for everybody in the room is, can we get ourselves on a path in '27 with our dividend, which is pretty high. We're yielding close to a 9%. With that yield, can we accelerate growth again? And if we can, I think we can have a stock that's poised to do pretty well.

Great. Well, thank you for all that great to set the stage. So let's dig in a bit, maybe starting with credit. Talk a little bit about the recent trends across your portfolio. How would you characterize the health of your borrowers? And what are you seeing in terms of revenue and EBITDA growth in sort of recent months and quarters?

Sure. So look, and I'm referencing the press not to be defensive, just I want to talk about the reality of what's going on versus the perception. The reality of what's happened, and I can talk with certainty through the first 6 months of the year. Many of our companies, I get monthly financials. So I think this is pretty accurate. You should assume our portfolio is going to see revenue and EBITDA growth somewhere in the range of 7% to 10% on the high end, let's call it, 8%, 8% or 9% on average.

The portfolio, we have about 400-odd line items. Average position size is about 20 basis points. That's by design. The idea is let's be highly, highly diversified. So if we do get something wrong on a name, it doesn't have a material impact on the portfolio. Average EBITDA or cash flow of the business is around $300 million. Average loan to value is right around 40%. So we have 60% subordination. So portfolio performance to date has been strong.

As I mentioned, worst case, I get quarterly numbers. Many cases, we're getting monthly numbers. When you're looking at a credit, usually, when you own something, it's not doing okay and then it just drops. It's usually a slow decline. So we have a pretty good insight into what's happening in the portfolio. I talked to my peers to try to get a sense, the big peers of what they're seeing, and they're experiencing similar trends. So I guess the big takeaway, hopefully, from today is credit quality remains pretty strong. And I can't look out more than a year, maybe 18 months, but I'm anticipating that, that will continue to be the case.

I will tell you one thing, if you get bored later, just to give you a sense of as you think about the credit markets, just to put it in perspective, go to ChatGPT, go to Claude and put in what is the leveraged loan market done for the last 36 years since 1990. If we had time, I'm not going to eat into our time, I could make the case that what we do in direct lending is materially safer than the syndicated market. It's not to say the syndicated market is bad, it's a good market. But I think if we spend time on it between our diligence, negotiating covenants versus having a bank as an intermediary, I think we can create a better portfolio. But let's just say they're equal.

Here's what you will find, 36 years of data syndicated loan portfolio has had 3 negative years. 2 of those years have been 1% or less in terms of negative return. So the big negative year was 2008. And everybody likes to point to that, but then you'll see the data. Look at 2009 by June of 2009, if you held on because it was mostly mark-to-market, the decline, you were back in the money.

So my point is this, 36 years of data would tell you that a well-diversified pool of loans has performed to rising rates, wars, inflation, whatever you want, it's had one materially bad year.

Okay. Maybe talk a bit about what you're seeing from a new deal perspective. So as we're moving through the refinancing cycle, how are deal terms evolving, spreads, covenants, PIK utilization? And I'm curious if you could also comment on maybe how competition is changing given the lower BDC formation and what appears to be a greater willingness from banks to kind of reengage where you are active?

Sure. I may need you to run through all of those again, but I'll try to -- I think I got it.

Maybe first, what you're seeing on the new deal side, how loan docs are evolving, that sort of thing.

Yes. So it's no secret with some negative sentiment around the asset class, inflows have slowed down, especially in the wealth channel across the board for everyone. I was hopeful that with inflows slowing, we could start to see spreads start to widen out. We've had some spread widening, but it's not been material. And that's really because the deal environment is somewhat benign. We had a good first 6 months of deployment, but it was lower than we want. We did about $10 billion of activity. There's a lot of dry powder. It will pick up, but it remains relatively slow.

In terms of what we're seeing from competitive landscape, covenants, covenants have remained pretty robust in our market, much stronger than what you would find in the public markets. You should just note for us at Blue Owl, I think part of the reason, as I look at our performance over the last 10 years, we've had about 12 basis points of loss per annum. I think we've done a good job of analyzing credits, but I think we've done a really good job of making sure that when we have problems, we've negotiated covenants that protect us that there's not going to be asset stripping. There's not going to be creditor on creditor violence. We've assured ourselves that in that downside scenario, we can get a good recovery if we're right. And so that is still the case today. We're getting, as I mentioned, $10 billion of deals, we have a threshold for covenants. We're seeing that.

From a competitive standpoint, there's been a lot of talk about the banks. If I took you back many, many years ago, I worked at a bank, ran leveraged finance. And I want you to know, despite the banks saying they want to be in the business, and they want to hold these loans. The single best risk-adjusted return for a bank is committed to a deal and selling it without writing a check. It's an infinite return on capital. And when it's a robust underwriting environment at every bank, the best area in fixed income is leveraged finance, underwriting loans and bonds.

So I bring that up because we're not seeing an increase in competition due to the banks. I think you mentioned PIK. For us, there are two types of PIKs in our portfolio. We have the PIKs, we call them PIK at origination. That means company, fast-growing business. Sponsor says to us, I'd like to take all that capital, we redeploy it in the business. But in 2 years, we'll be cash pay.

So our PIK at origination, that's coming down sharply. And you should know our PIK at origination never had a default, never had a loss, been a very good area for us to invest in. Likewise, PIK and that's 90-odd percent of our PIK exposure. Very de minimis amount are PIK due to restructurings. And I'm pleased to say -- last quarter, we announced that it came down, and I expect in the upcoming quarters, it will continue to come down.

So it's still a pretty good environment. I'd say the biggest negative in the environment right now is we wish deal flow was a little bit more robust. But away from that, underlying credit quality is good, not seeing an increase in the number of defaults, names on watch list. And as I said earlier, I feel pretty good over the next 12 to 18 months, those trends will continue.

Maybe just digging a little bit more into the potential deployment trends, the pipeline. Your confidence in deployment picking back up. I mean what do we need to see for that to happen? There's definitely another media narrative out there that there's tens of thousands of private equity companies that are sort of stuck. So what has to happen to kind of get things moving again and sort of drive your net deployments?

Well, there are a couple of -- I think what you're hitting on is true. I think there are vintages of private equity from '19, '20, '21, maybe '22, where a lot of PE firms probably overpaid for companies. It doesn't mean they have a material loss, but they don't have a meaningful gain. And the best way to think about it is this.

On the one hand, over here, we know there's at least $1 trillion, $1.5 trillion of dry powder with private equity firms. On the other side, over here, to your point, I don't know if it's tens of thousands of companies, but let's call it thousands of companies that have been held for more than 5 years that aren't being sold. So we've got all this capital. We've got businesses here. Nothing is happening. It's most likely because they don't have a meaningful gain and they need more time.

But in terms of what we're seeing, we have maturities that come up constantly. While M&A is muted, there's still a lot of M&A. I mean, we're just one firm. We put out $10 billion of capital in the first 6 months of the year. It's not what we hope for, but it's not bad. That $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, that will get deployed. And so one of the advantages a firm like Blue Owl has is we do have incumbency with thousands and thousands of companies. And so as those businesses think about buying a business, refinancing debt, even without a super active M&A environment, we're in a position to hopefully meet their needs and put out new capital.

Got it. Maybe just one last question on the credit side. What's the latest from the wealth channel? I think on the last earnings call, you guys indicated redemption requests were improving sequentially. I'm just curious, I think you're in the middle of your U.S. tender period process. Is there any update you can share as you're kind of working through that? And then more broadly, how would you describe current -- how retail investors and advisers are thinking about private credit more broadly?

Well, let me -- if it's okay with you, I'd like to just broaden that a little bit. So in terms of private wealth, we're still big believers. Penetration in that market is still very small, well below 5%. If you look at the traditional institution, it's approaching 20%, 25%. This is a market that is growing rapidly. We have massive amounts of wealth being created. You can see that for any of you know anything about the RIA channel. The RIAs are trading at 20x to 25x because there's a belief of all this wealth, they're going to continue to attract capital.

Same thing for us. We expect more and more of that capital to come into the market. It's going to come into the market because we think we're offering unique products that have really good risk-adjusted returns. So we're big believers in wealth. We have a couple of funds, new products we launched. We have our digital infrastructure fund in wealth. We have what's called OWLCX, which is our asset-backed business. Those have both exceeded expectations. We've hit $2 billion. ORENT, which is our nontraded REIT, it's the second biggest REIT in the market, still taking in meaningful inflows. It's at $16 billion. If I look back at digital infrastructure, we got to $2 billion quicker than ORENT. So I'm not saying it will grow that way to $16 billion, but I think it has a lot of upside. Same thing on the asset-backed side, much less competition, returns are very high and most importantly, in those products, the redemptions are de minimis.

In OWLCX and what we call ODIT, digital infrastructure, they're in and around 0.5% and ORENT, which is continuing to take in lots of capital. We had our lowest redemptions, I think, 1.5%, it's right around there, Alan, which is our lowest in 8 quarters. So that's what we're seeing kind of away from credit.

In terms of our credit book, and the main fund is OCIC, which I think is right around $20 billion of capital. That peaked in the first quarter. We saw a sequential decline in the second quarter. As you mentioned, we're in the middle of the tender period right now. It's too early for us to say. But I think on our call in the second quarter, we said we expect that to come down again. And so that's the trend we're seeing. I can tell you that what I'm pleased about is that we're not seeing an increase in the number of tenderers. So we had over 90% of the people in that fund say we want to stay in at under 10%, they've continued to tender, but the number has gone down.

And hopefully, with the negative rhetoric and the press dying down, we can start to take that down and over the next x number of quarters, eliminate that. So I'm cautiously optimistic there. I'll give you one interesting stat, which I just saw, we had a meeting on this. Today at Blue Owl, and we have a lot of advisers, as you can imagine, 70% of those advisers have clients in more than one Blue Owl product. If I went back to the same time last year, that number was at 50%. So what that says is even with negative story, we've seen a really nice uptick in our advisers who have worked with us adding Blue Owl products in this environment, many of the products I mentioned to you.

The other thing I just want to mention is I think many of you, if you invest in long-only firms, you know when someone gets into a redemption cycle, the net assets of the firm go down and the earnings of the firm decline, and they can decline meaningfully. For us, our credit products, as I mentioned, are about 11% of our fee-paying AUM. At our peak, we were slightly over $4 billion of redemptions, which is just 2%. I think people would be shocked if they drill down, they would see in the second quarter, we actually had net inflows from wealth, even paying out the full 5% redemption. And the business is growing. And I think Alan reiterated that we think we will beat consensus. So I think it's moderating in credit, and we're hopeful to see it continue to accelerate in the other parts of the business.

Great. We spent a bunch of time talking about real assets, but maybe just quickly touching on your GP stakes business.

Sure.

Just what are your latest thoughts on LP interest in GP stakes as an asset class? Is there any update you can give us on the fundraising for your latest flagship? And any other thoughts on the longer-term prospects for that sleeve of the business?

Yes. This is an interesting business. And we are -- and I don't say this with any ego at all, but we are the dominant player. We are bigger than our next 3 competitors combined. And as I mentioned early on, this is an asset class. It's a niche product. I think we probably get on earnings calls, maybe one question on this, maybe oftentimes 0. It's a really good business. The money is locked up for a very long period of time. The returns we've put out are exceptional.

Think about this for a minute. Think about you have the ability to go and these are private alternative asset managers where you have the ability to go and effectively become a partner at one of those firms. You get the fee and carry just like any of the partners. That's what we share in. And you probably are aware of this, the bigger firms have gotten materially better, and we've shared in that upside.

So the returns are really good. It's a very nice stream of income, and it's income with some meaningful cap gains. The biggest negative in the asset class that people struggle with is how do I get liquidity? I own a stake in a private company, what if they never monetize. What we've been able to do to address that is as the portfolios have matured, we've been able at a nice premium to be able to take a strip of that fund, let's say, it's a Fund III that might own 12, 14 managers and go sell the fully funded strip to an insurance company who can look at that and say, "Oh, I see the income and I want a really long-dated asset, which is hard to find that pays me an above-market current income.

And so the MOICs have been high. And as I mentioned, the current income has been great. So really bullish on that business. It's not going to be a 20% grower. It's going to be a slower grower for us, but we're spending a lot of time right now thinking about what are some other ways we can grow that business. So we recently launched a mid-market firm, and we've been exploring opportunities in the wealth channel as well. So more to come on that, but I'm pleased with where we are in that business.

Great. All right. Let's turn to AI. Your real assets business, but really the topic du jour. So AI specifically, there's been a lot of recent industry discussions focused on financing partnerships, capital formation. Maybe just to start out, remind us how exactly does Blue Owl participate in that sort of opportunity set?

Yes. So listen, I think it all starts with our triple net lease business. So we are the largest player by far in triple net lease. And again, a triple net lease, we go to an investment-grade counterparty. We buy a mission-critical asset. They lease it back for upwards of 20 years. We usually get close to a 3% escalator per year on that. We've generated really good, really great returns in this product. Now what does triple net lease mean? We get our income, all the expenses of that building we acquired, they're borne by the tenant, insurance, maintenance, taxes. That's pretty unique. This is for all of you for your PA, I'm telling you, spend time looking at this. The reason I bring this up is if I were to look at the credit quality of our average tenant, for a while, we own 10% or close to 10% of Walgreens stores.

So we'll do mission-critical retail as well. But on average, it's around a BBB. Then all of a sudden, there was this new market that emerged, the data center market, where we could go and provide capital, same triple net lease, but where the tenant on average was a Microsoft, a Google, a Meta and Amazon, AA or better rating on average. Same terms, same 20-year lease. And in fact, we've hit this inflection point in this market where we're earning more on a double-A or AAA than we are on a BBB.

So when we saw that, we knew we were in a unique position to go and provide capital to one of those firms who maybe was outsourced the building of that facility, and we did that. Then we came across the opportunity to actually become one of the builders. And we acquired a business a few years ago, where today, I can't say we're the largest, but we are one of the largest builders and operators of data centers globally. Over 140 data centers that we have built over the last 10 years. And again, there are others who are close. I think we are one of the biggest, if not the biggest, in terms of things we are owning and operating today.

Now by buying the land, by getting the power, by coming in and building it, we get to make extra spread, especially if we're doing it somewhere that's a little bit more remote. We're in this very unique time period where we're seeing demand like this and the supply has actually dropped way off. So when I bought the business -- when we bought the business a number of years ago, my biggest fear was what if we hit this inflection point where demand flattens out and supply catches up to it, can we still get a great return for our investors? I thought we could.

But what's happened in this environment, again, demand has been much greater than we thought and supply has shrunk. And so cap rates have remained exceptionally high. I mean, A plus for AA-type credits, sometimes even higher depending on where the land is located. So the question I get all the time is it sounds like a great opportunity. What's the downside? What if there's an overbuild? What am I missing? So you should know when we're spending time and evaluating these deals, there are a couple of risks. One is, well, is the tenant creditworthy. And so for example, overseas, our largest tenant is Amazon. We feel really good that they're a creditworthy tenant.

So then the question is, at the end of 20 years, I own all this land, I own millions of square feet of buildings, lots of infrastructure. What is that worth? That's hard. Now I will tell you how we run our models. We run our models assuming it's worth 0. And if it's worth 0, can we still get an adequate rate of return, somewhere between 7% and 10%, sometimes a little bit higher. In all of our deals, we won't do the deal. We have to be able to earn that in a 0 recovery scenario.

I would tell you, we think it's very improbable owning thousands of acres, millions of square feet of buildings that are pristine that it's a 0. The best example I can give you, I talked about this in one of our earlier meetings. We own and operate a data center that was built for AOL, you've got mail, like literally was built in the late '90s. It went from AOL, it went to LinkedIn, it went to Microsoft, it's at Oracle, and we have a long-dated lease there. The useful life of these is quite long. So what we -- it's funny, we are part of the AI ecosystem.

But I would tell you, when I sit down with our investors, Anthropic comes through ChatGPT, whoever it might be on the latest AI LLM or something else that touches it, it's hard to figure out what the value is and where it can go. I can tell you on the infrastructure side, we believe this is a place where people can put out large sums of capital and rest easy that you're going to make an adequate rate of return. And I think there is the potential to make 20%, 30% and many multiples on your money in this asset class. So we're quite bullish on it. And we're finishing up our latest fund. It's done quite well. And our backlogs at Blue Owl for demand for the land we have, I'm not allowed to give the number, but the backlogs are the biggest we've ever experienced.

You answered most of my next question, which is going to be the risks, how you think about the potential for overbuild. Maybe I'll just add.

We're just in sync. I knew where you were going.

It's almost like you knew the question in. So maybe I'll just ask, is there any context around the news that came out over the weekend? Any additional color that investors should be thinking through? Or it kind of sounds like what you're saying is the backlog is so immense that it's -- I wouldn't say meaningless, but it is not slowing you down. But any other color on sort of the AI slowdown potential headwinds that we've been seeing?

Yes. Look, I think the news that's come out over the last 10 days or so is cause for concern. And I'm not an expert. I've been reading what everybody else has been reading, talking to a lot of people. And there's a lot of unknowns. I think my takeaway from this is the demand for compute is growing exponentially. And there is no slowdown. I think safety guards, safety rails are key, and I hope they're inactive, but they need to be enacted globally. But for all of us in this room, using AI to make our lives easier and to become more efficient and for every room like this around the world, I don't see that slowing down.

And then all you have to do is look at Anthropic's revenue, how it's been growing tenfold every year. There's never been anything like it. And we're seeing it. We are seeing this insatiable demand for compute. I will tell you, long term, when I talked about that supply/demand, at some point, we will get to equilibrium where we have enough data center capacity, we have enough compute. And we hope at that point, we have really attractive Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta paper in our portfolios so that when one of those companies says, I'm not financing at an 8 anymore, I'm financing at 5. We've got a bunch of paper that all of a sudden, the market becomes 5. And I think that's how it's going to play out. But I don't see any slowdown in the demand and the efficiencies it affords all of us. So I think we're well positioned for the next few funds.

And maybe how should investors think about translating all this into Blue Owl earnings power? So as the segment keeps scaling, you mentioned before, real assets is your fastest-growing segment. How do we think about triple net lease, the flagship funds, the wealth fund, ODIT, all these contributing to overall fee growth and earnings power? How would you kind of frame that up?

Yes. We haven't come out with '27 guidance. I think Alan will address that later in the year or early in the first quarter. Yes, I talked about this earlier. Our growth has been slower than we'd like this year, not surprised given everything that went on. So the question is how do we grow quicker next year? I gave you the example of advisers, the number of advisers who now have more than one product.

I think the best way to think about is what's going on in the core of the business. So in credit, we're still bringing in money. In real assets, we launched our -- I think it's Fund VII. We went out at $7.5 billion. We're right around $8 billion. We got permission to go above $8 billion. I don't know where we'll end up, but let's call it, around $8.5 billion, so well above our target.

We went out with the European net lease business. We think Europe, much less competition. We believe we're one of the first movers there. We wanted to raise $1 billion. We raised $1.5 billion. Across the board, I'll just list a couple of others. We have our strategic equity fund. We wanted to raise between $1 billion and $2 billion. We raised $3 billion. That's a continuation vehicle, which I think has the potential to be quite large.

We're working on credit secondaries now. I mentioned GP Stakes is in the market with a middle market fund. We launched other credit verticals, real estate credit, digital infrastructure credit. Each of those will be well in excess of $1 billion. And we think we have the potential to build something really significant. We didn't talk about insurance. A lot of our peers, there's a lot of noise in insurance today with one firm in particular, but we create a lot of product that is quite good for insurance companies, but we're a relatively small player in insurance. We outsource it. We sell to a lot of our peers.

And we brought in the CIO of an insurance company called Prosperity. It was owned by Elliott. They started at de novo and sold it for billions of dollars. His name is Deva Mishra. We've got major focus on how do we grow that line of business. So I like how we're positioned. I like our assets. At the end of the day, when there was a lot of negative press, the one thing that we could control at Blue Owl, and I think this is really important. I talked to the team about it, is performance. And performance, I started with this across the board has been exceptional. And if we can continue to identify markets where demand is greater than supply, and we can come and continue to create alpha for our clients, I think we're well poised to have meaningful growth in the future. And that's what we're going to continue to do.

Great. Unfortunately, we're out of time. Great. We have to leave it there.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you, everyone.

Good morning, and welcome to Blue Owl Capital's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I'd like to advise all parties that this conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Anne Day, Head of Investor Relations for Blue Owl.

Thanks, operator, and good morning to everyone. Joining me today are Mark Lipschultz, our Co-Chief Executive Officer; and Alan Kirshenbaum, our Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind our listeners that remarks made during the call may contain forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future performance or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that are outside the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those described from time to time in Bell Capital's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. .

We also like to remind everyone that we'll refer to non-GAAP measures on the call, which are reconciled to GAAP figures in our earnings presentation available on the Shareholders section of our website at blueowl.com. Please note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any blue all fund. This morning, we issued our financial results for the second quarter of 2026, reporting fee-related earnings, or FRE of $0.25 per share and distributable earnings or DE of $0.22 per share. We declared a dividend of $0.23 per share for the second quarter payable on August 27 to holders of record as of August 13. During the call today, we'll be referring to the earnings presentation, which we posted to our website this morning. So please have that on hand to follow along. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Mark.

Great. Thank you so much, Ann. This morning, we reported our financial results for the second quarter of 2026, highlighting 9% DE growth versus a year ago quarter. This growth was broad-based across products and geographies, demonstrating the continued diversification of Blue Owl's platform and reinforcing the strength and stability of our business across a wide variety of market environments. Over the past few quarters, we've looked to address questions about our business, and our ongoing goal is to continue to offer key facts that illuminate the diversification, resilient investment performance and core growth trends we see across our business. .

On diversification, which we believe has been an overlook theme and a key evolution of the Blue Owl story. We start with our real assets platform, which now constitutes nearly 30% of our AUM. We have grown real assets AUM by 25% and revenues by 27% versus a year ago, with particular strength from our net lease and digital infrastructure strategies. In this platform, our central positioning and strong track record in these markets have continued to resonate with institutional and wealth investors alike, and this has not gone unnoticed by industry participants. Recently, we were named PRE's Global Net Lease Investor of the Year, Global Data Center Investor of the Year, Global Retail Investor of the Year -- and we've been ranked #2 on PRE's top 100 real estate fund raisers globally.

This recognition highlights that our real assets platform launched 4.5 years ago with $12 billion of has raised more money over the past 5 years than nearly every other real estate manager globally. We're honored to be leading such an steam list of managers and believe our success reflects our singular focus on creating differentiated risk reward and strong yield-based outcomes for our investors. Since we first established our foothold in real assets in late 2021, we've expanded AUM sevenfold and continue to anticipate that it will be our fastest-growing area for the foreseeable future.

In credit, the sources of growth have expanded as we invested bond strategies, such as alternative credit, investment-grade credit and GP-led secondaries. Today, direct lending is approximately 35% of our AUM compared to nearly half of our AUM just 2 years ago. In contrast, alternative credit, which is approaching 10% of our credit AUM has experienced 35% AUM growth over the past year. During the second quarter, we reached the 1-year anniversary of the inception of our alternative credit interval fund which has surpassed $2.7 billion in size and has outperformed the leveraged loan index by more than 600 basis points over that period. We've also meaningfully scaled drawdown funds and alternative credit -- our opportunistic fund, which held its final close last quarter, raised 1.6x more than the prior vintage against a market backdrop of private credit concerns and a challenging global fundraising environment. We continue to anticipate outsized growth from our alternative credit strategy. In GP's Strategic Capital, our market-leading position in the specialist strategy has continued to pay off. with approximately $5.5 billion raised over the last year across the comingled fund co-invest and innovative strip sales structures. Finally, we continue to introduce de novo strategies that draw upon our investment expertise in various asset classes and offer incremental product suite diversity.

Over the last couple of years, we have highlighted GP-led secondaries and Net Lease Europe as some examples of these organic growth initiatives. Last quarter, we held the final close of our Bos product at a total of $3 billion and we have closed $1.5 billion for net lease Europe. Adding to this list, we're now in market with the first vintages of our data center credit and real estate credit strategies and have raised over $1 billion in aggregate towards a $1.5 billion goal. Summarizing our thoughts on diversification. As we look at the first half of 2026 across Blue Al, a period spanning the most acute headline noise and elevated redemptions for nontraded BDCs. We raised more than $16.5 billion of equity capital across the firm for more than 40% of our last 12-month total. Over the last 12 months, more than 75% of the equity capital we've raised has been into nondirect lending strategies and roughly 2/3 has been from institutional and insurance clients, underscoring the breadth and resilience of our business.

Moving on to investment performance. We continue to experience strong outcomes across the board with no meaningful change in strategy level performance in direct lending. Performance of our funds and vehicles has continued to outpace their relevant benchmarks. Importantly, the underlying portfolio of companies we finance have continued to grow and mid- to high single-digit pace on average, providing incremental support to our position as the senior secured piece of these companies' capital structures. Across our direct lending strategy, credit health remains strong, we have seen no meaningful change in our watch list compared to a year ago.

We remain vigilant on credit health and are prepared for some normalization off of very low loss rates -- but today, we are sitting at a 12 basis points average annual realized loss rate with a net gain in our technology lending book. Through June, our nontraded BDC OCIC Class I shares have returned over 9% since inception outperforming the leveraged loan and high-yield indices by more than 300 and 450 basis points since inception. Additionally, we have begun to see divergence across managers, we expect differentiation and outcomes to continue across market sizing with the upper middle market outperforming the lower middle market as it has over the past years and anticipate further dispersion among upper middle market managers highlighting quality of underwriting and credit selection.

In real assets, our net lease strategy has generated 13.6% total return over the past 12 months, with the Class I shares of our nontraded REIT rent have returned 9% annualized since inception, and both O Rent and our nontraded digital infrastructure O REIT debt have increased their dividends this past year, and GP stakes, we continue to rate very favorably against private equity products of the same vintages, but top quartile rankings across fonts on DPI. While we're cognizant that sentiment can shift with market conditions and investor expectations, we believe our high-quality performance across strategies will allow Blue Owl to serve our investors well through a variety of market environments. With the diversification I highlighted earlier in my remarks, ensuring balance for our platform in the midst of the cross winds of fluctuate in semi.

Bringing it back to where we started. We believe the results we reported this morning continue to demonstrate the resilience of our business in the midst of many market cross prints, which do not uniquely impact Blue Owl. As I consider the growth we've achieved over the past 2 years or even 5 years, -- we have done so through a wide range of risk-free rate environments, multiple geopolitical escalations and a broad spectrum of capital market backdrops. Our growth rate has fluctuated through these landscapes, but we have consistently demonstrated growth and durability and we maintained very strong investment performance throughout. We're very proud of the business we've built. We're exceptionally thankful for the tireless efforts of our Grateful Owl team and we are optimistic about the path forward for her. With that, let me turn it to Alan to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone. As we highlighted in this morning's earnings presentation, Blue Owl grew earnings by 9% compared to the second quarter of 2025. Looking at the second quarter versus a year ago, management fees grew 8%, excluding the impact of management fee offsets, FRE grew 9% and DE grew 9%. Our FRE margin was 58.5% in line with our outlook for the year and modestly up from the first quarter and 2025 levels. AUM not yet paying fees increased to $31 billion, representing approximately $380 million of expected annual management fees once deployed. This is equivalent to approximately 15% embedded growth from our 2025 management fees.

As this capital is drawn down and put to work, it converts into fee-paying AUM and will continue to support management fee growth across our platforms. To continue with Mark's themes, he covered in his remarks, our continued diversification and strong investment performance I'll cover the core growth trends we see across our business. First, given the number of drawdown funds we have in market this year, we expect institutional fundraising to remain strong in the second half of the year. On our net lease strategy, during 2Q, we exceeded the hard cap initially set for this vintage and have raised 1.5x more than the predecessor vintage.

The investor interest and engagement here has been really impressive. So we wanted to share some stats, which include just a year after the first close, we have raised $7.7 billion and surpassed the original hard cap. Inclusive of Co-invest, we've raised $8.7 billion. Approximately 60% of these investor commitments are from first-time investors in the strategy. New consultant recommendation led to over $1.5 billion of this capital raised. And geographically, we added LPs from Australia, Korea, Scandinavia, Israel, Kuwait and the UAE, constituting roughly 40% of capital raised to date.

In wealth, we believe we have seen a bottoming of Evergreen inflows in the May 1 close, supported by continued strong performance in these products and ongoing education across stakeholder groups. And for the July 1 close, we saw a greater than 50% increase in Evergreen inflows versus that May 1 close. While we are still below historical levels, we are encouraged by this data and continue to see increased engagement from home offices and financial advisers. And the recent redemption data is also supportive of better trends in the wealth channel. We saw a modest reduction in redemption requests in the second quarter for our nontraded BDC.

While we are not calling for a V-shaped recovery and sentiment around private credit, we do think that the strong fundamental performance of our products has played a role in the decline of redemption requests to the nontraded BDCs and which we continue to view as more sentiment driven and led by individual clients as opposed to financial advisers or distribution partners. For the second quarter in a row, we continue to see 90% of our OCIC fund investors not request a single dollar of redemptions. The small shareholder base that did put in for redemption requests remain largely unchanged from last quarter with very limited new participation.

And while we believe this has become very well understood by shareholders, as a reminder, the liquidity in our nontraded BDCs has remained very strong. As we highlight on Slide 25 of our earnings presentation, with repayments in the loan book meaningfully more than covering the net outflows during the second quarter. Outside of the non-traded BDCs, we saw no increase in redemption activity across our other Evergreen products over the past few quarters. We raised $7.8 billion of total capital during the quarter, bringing our last 12-month total capital raising to $50.5 billion, the equivalent of 18% of our total AUM at this time last year.

All of this capital raising was organic, and nearly 40% of it was raised during the first half of 2026 during a period of elevated headlines about private credit and software and in the midst of meaningful geopolitical uncertainty. Fundraising was particularly strong in real assets this quarter, with about 60% of our equity capital raise originating from this platform across a number of strategies and products. Institutional and insurance investors comprised about 3/4 of equity capital raised in the second quarter and roughly 2/3 of last 12-month equity capital raised. And compared to the prior 12-month period, Institutional flows were more than 30% higher year-over-year, reflecting the expansion and diversification of our business that Mark highlighted in his remarks.

Moving on to business performance across our platforms. In credit, we continue to generate strong absolute and relative performance across direct lending, alternative credit and other credit categories. Last 12-month total returns were 8.3% for direct lending and 11.4% for alternative credit comparing favorably to relevant public credit benchmarks over the same period. Deployment was robust across credit led by alternative credit and investment-grade credit. Similar to the trends we are seeing in fundraising, our platform expansion has benefited deployment with all credit deploying nearly $7 billion over the last 12 months, more than double the prior 12-month period, and we've seen meaningful deployment expansion for investment-grade credit as well.

In direct lending, we continue to see deployment consistent with an industry backdrop of moderate sponsor-driven M&A activity and continue to see meaningful repayments at par and other metric demonstrating health and liquidity within the portfolio. In Real Assets, we continue to see elevated pipelines with very attractive risk return dynamics with nearly $160 billion of near-term opportunities across net lease and digital infrastructure. In net lease Fund VI, we have fully committed the funds and continue to have visibility with capital calls in 3Q and to be virtually fully called by the end of the year, which would be within 3 years of our final close.

As I noted earlier, we are making excellent progress on the next vintage, which has already exceeded at $7.5 billion hard cap, and we plan to finish up capital raising this year. Our net lease strategy continues to focus on highly thematic investment opportunities, including industrials and reshoring, cold storage, data centers and health care as demonstrated by recent announcements such as the Sela and Spire transactions. In digital infrastructure, we continue to advance forward with a list of compelling development projects in progress and under discussion with exceptional partners.

Today, our data center footprint spans more than 140 data centers owned or under construction globally with 15.3 gigawatts of leased and owned capacity. In GP strategic capital, we raised approximately $1.3 billion during the quarter, driven by our flagship large-cap strategy and an additional strip sale transaction. The total raised in our sixth vintage is $10.6 billion inclusive of coinvest. Across the past 2 years, we have engaged in 5 strip sale transactions that have an aggregate generated $4.6 billion of return of capital for our investors. We have seen strong interest from new investors for these structures, which can provide a broader set of attachment points across the return spectrum and allow LPs to invest in a highly visible and proven pool of assets.

Looking out at the rest of the year, there are a few items I'd like to call out. On stock-based compensation, a quick reminder from our February earnings call, there are 3 categories running through our stock comp expense numbers, all shown on Slide 34 of our earnings presentation. First, our regular way year-end stock compensation, what we call equity-based compensation other. This is the number to focus on, and we continue to expect to run at approximately $365 million for 2026. Second, business combination grants goes to 0 starting in the fourth quarter of this year; and third, acquisition-related is GAAP amortization expense related to some of the acquisitions we've made over the last few years.

As for an overall 2026 guidance update, on last quarter's call, we said we think we could beat visible alpha consensus estimates for 2026. We reaffirm that again today. And to be specific, at that time, FRE per share was $1.02 and DE per share was $0.89. We think we can beat those numbers this year. With that, why don't we jump into Q&A. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Operator, can we please open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question today comes from the line of Glenn Schorr from Evercore ISI.

Your last comment made me change my question. Alan, could you maybe address of the where you can -- where you think you -- the geography of where you might be able to beat that visible alpha $1.32 just which line items do you think are the source?

Yes, of course. You're definitely allowed to change your question, Glenn. Yes, look, we have some visibility into growth for the next couple of quarters, right? So for direct lending, we're going to look to net deployment numbers as an indicator to management fee growth for the next few quarters, but let's assume that's a push for now. We're wrapping up the latest GP stakes vintage, so we're going to add a little growth there. And for net lease, let's break down the pieces there for Fund VI that was 65% drawn at quarter end. We're out with a capital call now that will bring us to 77% drawn next month.

And I mentioned earlier, we have line of sight to effectively fully called with that -- with Fund VI by the end of the year. Our current vintage is about 10% called and about 40% committed already. So good early progress there. And that capital call that 10% came in on June 25. So full quarter in 3Q there. And our next digital infrastructure flagship, I mentioned also, I think, in our prepared remarks that we're expecting our first close later this year. So you'll see more growth from that. And there's a difference here. If you recall, fundraising for net lease generally doesn't immediately link to management fee growth, it's deployment, right, as we know.

That links to the pace of management fee growth. For digital infrastructure, we charge on committed capital, so more immediate management fee growth impact there. So look, there can always be fluctuations on a quarterly basis. Capital calls are lumpy. They're not straight lines. but we are seeing long-term management fee growth. And remember, we have the $31 billion of AUM not yet paying fees, that will get deployed over time. And that's $380 million over time. But we have visibility into the next quarter or 2, where we do see management fee growth building each of the next 2 quarters.

Your next question comes from the line of Craig Siegenthaler from Bank of America. .

So we have a 2 parter on the data center book. I'm curious how are cap rates trending in light of an increase in competition across the peers and also, can you update us on the underlying tenant credit quality watch list? I know most are IG tenants, but debt levels are rising and not all are IG. So I'm curious if you saw any changes quarter-over-quarter. .

Sure, happy to. We continue to experience very strong cap rates. So to be direct, we are not seeing compression in cap rates competition. Again, remember, we do something very, very distinct. There's a few people in the world that can do it, but only a few and do it, and that is to build in partnership where we have the actual ability to design, build, operate. We have 1,000 people in our STACK deal and adjacent businesses, and that has made us the partner often of choice for all of the hyperscalers.

And that partner and ability to deliver on time, on budget and do it in a reliable fashion at scale 140 x. I think we're now at 15 gigawatts of -- out of center capacity that we have either built or are building, including the biggest project currently underway in the world down in Louisiana or at least best of our [indiscernible] in the world, I guess we don't know what's happening in China. So that leads to a value of mutual value for us and Viperscaler.

So no, we are continuing to see and are developing a very attractive rates and in fact with rising interest rates, perhaps that even helps escalate those cap rates. In terms of -- what was the part was credit quality. Look, our business, if you look at our funds, the single-digit percentage is done with people that are noninvestment grade. So you could take your own view of the current AA borrowers and whether they're AA credits are strengthening and weakening or neutral. But our business is an IG business, non-IG is essentially inconsequential to what we do .

Your next question comes from the line of Steven Chubak from Wolfe Research. .

So I wanted to ask on the retail fundraising strategy. Just given year-to-date BDC redemption trends have been much more concentrated across a subset of international investors. Just wanted to better understand whether the recent turmoil within the non-traded BDC space, whether it's reshaped your approach to expanding the retail distribution abroad, and is there a way to isolate what might be considered hot money versus a stickier core U.S. retail base across your platform?

Thanks, Stephen. I'll take that. I appreciate the question. Yes. Look, overall, we feel good about what we're seeing right now, just pulling the lens back with wealth overall. We think we've troughed by way of inflows, and we commented on that. Redemptions are down in our nontraded BDCs. And I commented earlier, we haven't seen increases in redemptions across our other wealth dedicated products over the past few quarters. So we're cautiously optimistic that nontraded BDC redemptions will keep coming down, and it appears others are seeing that, too. .

We're seeing strong flows into our Oren product. And both ORAN and Odet have raised their dividend this year. And to that point, performance is strong across our wealth dedicated products. There's been so much focus on the nontraded BDC space. Looking outside of that, we're running at 10% to 12% annualized return so far this year for Owl CX, for ORE and for ODT. And so let's take a product like Oren just to double-click on that. Since its launch in September 2022, Irwin has been the top-performing nontraded REIT, putting up a consistent 9% annualized return, been a category leader in private evergreen real estate fundraising on both a net and gross basis in just 4 years to become the largest -- second largest sorry, private REIT in the market with $16 billion of AUM.

And look, more broadly in wealth, what we're seeing is financial advisers and home offices have been very supportive of us in our products because they see us continuing to post these strong performance returns. And we've been very transparent with them through the challenging period that we just went through. And we're now seeing a broadening in adviser participation across our distribution partners. So just to share what we're seeing in hearing. We've already launched on 13 new platforms this year. So talking about where are we seeing the opportunities in wealth and in growth. We're also slated to launch on 21 more platforms this year.

We continue to see a very steady growth of new advisers allocating to our funds for the first time and for financial advisers that invested in our products in 2Q, 74% or more than 1 Owl product versus 52% in 2025. So what we're seeing is, once advisers allocate capital, we're seeing significant cross-selling opportunity, which is really a testament to continued strong performance. You continue to see that. You continue to hear that theme from us and having built a really diversified product offering for the financial adviser community.

So all of this shows us we're really seeing a strong level of financial adviser and investor confidence in Blue Owl. And so internationally, we continue to -- I don't want to say minimize, but we continue to grow our wealth platform across the board. We have very minimal exposure across our wealth products to Asia.

One, I think, important point of color coming out of this very tumultuous period or at least narratively tumultuous which is there's a lot actually to take away about the durability of the wealth channel and its rationality. Recognize the performance numbers speak, I think, for themselves at this point. We continue to deliver and expect we'll continue to deliver very strong performance. That was true before the superstorm of the narrative. It was true Durian and it's true after. And I think actually, the channel, there's a lot to take away that's favorable, even though none of us would have wish this experience, which is, first of all, it stayed very concentrated in the products where the narrative and the conversations perhaps got most carried away.

The acteConcentric circles away from that, even 1 circle away, go to something like asset-backed, and we continue to see both inflows and very minimal outflows go to things like O rent. Again, the 1 of the most successful products in the marketplace, raising dividend. Investors are delineating between asset categories. And even those who were the narrative, perhaps drove behavior, it actually stayed very concentrated. We made this comment before, but the redemption in our core income product, 90% of the investors didn't ask and we're appreciative of it for a single share back because they know the product is working.

So the redemption behavior was narrowed to about 10% of the investors in a very specific product. So actually look out 5 years and say, what do we now know about the wealth channel. I actually think what we know is the structures work and we know that actually the market is very much able to discern indeed, when there are narrative moments. We all appreciate it's going to have a slightly different feel in that market, where people are going to quickly pull back on inflows and you're going to have to deal with out pools for a period of time, but it's much, much more durable and much more narrow than I think anybody probably thought and even again, the way I think the narrative is today, there's a lot to like about the wealth channel over the medium and long term.

Your next question comes from the line of Bill Katz from TD Cowen.

So I appreciate the updated confidence in beating guidance, great to hear. I think it removes a lot of risks on the story. And just thinking about that and looking at your margin profile, FRE margin, I did the math correct, it looks like you had about 80% incremental margin year-on-year. So as you think about the trajectory made for the second half of the year and then again into 2027, how are you thinking about maybe the opportunity here to drive a little bit better profitability?

Thanks, Bill. I appreciate that. Look, we do continue to feel good and very good about where we are and where we're going with FRE margin. 58.5% was the guide for the year. We've already achieved that in the second quarter of the year. You should continue to expect modest increases as we go out over the next few years, but we feel good about where we are and where we're going there.

Okay. So just to clarify then the opportunity for the media being expectation is more of a top line story at this point? Just I understand the modeling. .

Sure. Yes.

Your next question comes from the line of Brennan Hawken from BMO Capital.

So we'd love to ask about GPV. So you mentioned that you're at $10.6 billion to date. I believe that's what you mentioned. What's your updated expectations for size and timing for final close? And then really more importantly, given sort of the expectations for consolidation among mid-market what are there more long term, what are the limitations to growth on this strategy? And what are you hearing from LPs around some of those concerns?

Sure. I'll take the first part of that, Brennan. Since the beginning of fundraise for this vintage in total, we've actually raised about $15 billion when you include this vintage co-invest and the strip sales that we've done. So $10.6 billion in the flagship in co-invest, specifically 9.7% in the vintage and then about $4.5 billion that we've raised over the past 2 years across the strip sales. We're in the final stretch of the fund raise. We'll see where we wrap up this year, but we will wrap up this year, and we continue to make steady progress towards where we want to be there.

The opportunity to add on that side is really more about the evolving marketplace. You have a lot of very important franchise businesses that are of substantial scale and people need to find the proper way to monetize. And fortunately, our GP Stakes business is the singular market leader. If you look at the large end of the market, which is very much where we like to operate. And by the way, I think this environment is reinforcing why you very much want to be in the large end of the market and not in the middle market. The middle market as a general matter with some exceptions, we see them in our growth fund is an area where there's a question of like what is the franchise over the long term. .

The big firms are not -- thankfully, are going to actually consolidate their role as we're all seeing. The bigger are getting bigger. And those owners, you need to find capital solutions over time to support that growth and support generational transition. So that really makes us the destination for those opportunities. So we definitely see a very strong addressable growing market over time. to be able to deploy and deploy very successfully in a way that works for those firms and clearly works for our doctors. Again, I think hear this a few times, the results speak for themselves.

If you look across the board, and I don't want to down this road deep on this question, but performance really matters. And if you look, we are delivering extremely strong performance in all of our platforms and all of our products. There's an example where we're rated amongst the very best performers in the land of PE. And as you know, we talked about this Dow Jones ranking before, #1 in the world by that measure. So I think we feel very good that this is a very, very attractive way to participate in the PE landscape.

And as a note, if you think about what we've been able to do at Blue Owl, listen, there are some wonderful PE firms in the world, the boy, they go to what they do, and we're lunky to new business with a lot of them and lucky enough to own stakes in a lot of them. We've also created our own approach to this asset class. So we have the GP stakes business, so you can be an owner on the ALT side as opposed to the LTP payer. And we have our Blue Owl's product, which is now a $3 billion product in a rapidly growing market. where we are buying the self-selected best-of-breed assets, and it is really working.

Our portfolio has come together in excellent form, we're deployed at a really attractive rate. And that product, I think, has a lot of promise in the future. So we've developed Agana you would I think, hopefully expect of us our own way that's very consistent with our DNA to participate in this -- frankly, the biggest asset class in ALTS without going to head to head, which it was a very different proposition with the many, many good providers in a place where there's already a lot of capital sort of trapped. So I think we've got a couple of very, very good ways to skin that...

Our next question comes from the line of Patrick Davitt from Autonomous Research.

The market still obviously hyper-focused on your exposure to retail direct lending, but you have a great track record, clearly, have institutional relationships where it looks like demand might actually be leaning in. So what has your hesitancy been to do a big traditional drawdown fund like some of your competitors have? And would you consider launching 1 to help fill in the capital loss on the retail side?

Sure, happy to start on that one. So I appreciate the predicate of the question. Performance in our retail direct lending product continues to be, and we expect will continue to be extremely strong. Low loss rates, great strong returns, good diversification. So we feel very good about the product. Again, we do understand both 2 things. We understand that there are legitimate questions that have been raised, although I will tell you that time and deep study have led us to ever-increasing comfort about the manageability of the software transition question.

So we appreciate that, that was a valid and remains a valid conversation. But at the same time, these are very diversified portfolios, and they are performing extremely well. And we're built to handle -- very well built to handle when there are all the periodic issues that there undoubtedly are will be. We think that channel will recover very nicely. That doesn't mean V-shaped or rapidly, but we can already see it. The tone has changed meaningfully. And we even acknowledge at high levels, we already saw our redemption requests come down in Q2. And we see a tone continuing to settle and people realize and these products really work.

And in fact, in a rising rate environment, which apparently now is the new norm from 6 months ago, direct lending is exactly the place to be, and I think investors appreciate that. Institutions do, we absolutely have seen a meaningful uptick in institutional engagement. Timing is always a little trickier with things like big SMAs, but we expect to post some really attractive results on fundraising in total in Q3, but including the credit side, on the institutional side. As for drawdown, not draw down, we do have a product called ODL, which actually is a drawdown structure, but have some nuances to make it slightly different from a traditional one.

We have no hesitation to launch a drawdown product and in fact, I expect we will effect where people want to put the capital. We're never trying to force-feed people structure for our purposes. We want to meet them where they want to be. So it seems quite logical that we would actually launch the right drawdown -- traditional draw-down structure. And it's less about kind of offsetting retail I think retail will indeed already show signs of recovery. Again, not rapidly. We're not trying to get anybody ahead of themselves in this market. It takes time for after hurricane blows through to clean back up again. But we feel good about retail.

We also do feel good about institutional and we'll absolutely -- we're absolutely open-minded to creating a drawdown project at certainly talked about it actively. And imagine we will, if that's where our investors want to be. And you'll finally, let's again, just go back to the rate environment we're in is exactly what you want to be in direct web, individual or institutional or like I mean how many years in a row has it been now that everyone is sure rates are about to come down and everyone is wrong every time. And so I am sure it will be true eventually. But the point being our product that insulates and provides for that is a really good place for any type of investor, insurance, institutional or retail line.

Your next question comes from the line of Devin Ryan from Citizens Bank.

And Alan, how are you I appreciate the full year outlook. Just want to connect kind of the credit deployment team. You guys mentioned direct lending activities consistent with the moderate sponsor M&A environment that's pretty consistent with the data we're tracking right now as well. We have flip side alternative credit, investment-grade credit, some of the other newer strategies are growing pretty quickly from a smaller basis.

So just trying to think about credit fee paying AUM growth, maybe looking out a little bit further, maybe the next 18 months or so, do we need to see a more meaningful acceleration in kind of the broader sponsor-led M&A backdrop? Or some of the newer strategies large enough are becoming large enough to move the needle? And just more broadly on that sponsor kind of M&A backdrop, what are you seeing there as well? You just want to get some of the puts and takes.

Yes. So look, the underpinning to our thinking and to what Alan has come out and you can add anything here, that is additional, is not about a rapid recovery in the sponsor activity market. Now that day will come, and we're we're hopeful and frankly, kind of the math tells you eventually capital gets deployed and eventually assets have to go back. But that's not the predicate for what we're talking about. We have all these other strategies, as you know, that are growing very substantially. And that, as Alan noted, is really what we're looking at when we talk about driving the growth, when there is a more meaningful cyclic recovery or secular recovery, whatever the case may be, in private equity, that should give us some additional wind in our sales. So it is not predicated on a meaningful rebound that indeed would be additive helpful, supportive, I do think it will happen.

But there's no point getting to have ourselves on that. Either it's not happened yet, that's apparent. We can all look and see in the M&A market on the PE side. It's a tepid environment. That all said, with the -- let's call it, the storm, this industry went through the last 6 months and a very tepid environment, we grew our business 9%. And as Alan talked about, we see sequential improvement now coming in 3 and 4 and into 2027. So I think those other things would be very nice to have a meaningful recovery in retail. It would be nice to have recovery in reactivity nice to have, and those will all be nice additive and reinforcing forces.

The only thing I would add here is we would expect, as I think you would, a natural improvement in the growth rates as we see deployment continue over time as we see that start to come back at some point in the future. And the net flow picture gets better. We commented on the net flows. We've seen that build since the month of April, the May 1 closing, we've seen it build since then. It's built nicely. We have a long ways to go there, but it has built nicely. .

And if I pull the lens back a little bit more than that, overall, when we talk about, I guess, this question and the last question, institutional fundraising, we commented that, overall, we do see that remaining strong in the second half of the year. And overall, we do think fundraising for the second half, we think could be better than the first half. So we continue to be cautiously optimistic about where we're sitting.

Well, at the end of the day, look, mathematically, we have $31 billion of capital that's not yet paying fees. That's $380 million that's coming into the P&L again without trying to take a position on exactly when activity relevel price, that is forthcoming. So I think we're trying to take a very realistic approach and not counting on exogenous variables to carry today. That would -- those will come, and they will be helpful and additive. .

Your next question comes from the line of Crispin Love from Piper Sandler.

On digital infrastructure, your data center business has definitely been a significant growth area for you. and your focus has been on the infrastructure. Can you just discuss further opportunities there? Do you see chips financing as being an additional place where you could add to this area and 1 that you'd be interested in over the intermediate long term? .

Yes. Digital infrastructure is a really important growth opportunity. And I don't want to say was scratching the surface because we're amongst the leaders in these hyperscale projects. But you're absolutely correct. There are areas that surround that, some of which we already touch and do well, and we've been involved in fiber that surrounds the data centers very successfully. Power is clearly an area that is both capital-intensive and becoming endemic. As you know, behind-the-meter power solutions are becoming a part of the data center solution as opposed to leveraging the grid in many markets. So that brings us ever more proximate and engaged in the power side of the equation. .

So we absolutely continue to see look and believe, we're in a pretty distinctive position. by virtue of being the partner of choice and therefore, helping in partnership with these wonderful companies control the project that gives us access to a lot of the other opportunities beyond the data centers. You asked specifically about chip financing. We already do participate in dip financing, not in our body product, not in triple net lease because remember, those are about very long-dated arrangements with extremely strong counterparties, but we already do in our lending business participate in chip finance, for example, participated in a meaningful financing a while back for XAI, which I guess now is part of SpaceX.

And we -- so this -- yes, that's an area of opportunity. It has to be done structurally right. It's a different proposition from triple net. But again, a good example of where, as a firm by being very integrated as we are and stayed focused on this choice -- partner of choice for capital solutions, long-dated capital solutions, absolutely chips continue to be an area of opportunity in our lending business in particular.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Blostein from Goldman Sachs.

I was hoping we can double-click into the wealth channel outside of the nontraded BDCs for both the old credit fund and you guys are seeing nice pickup in flows as you talked about. I think there's a good chunk of them that still have fee waivers attached or incentives attached to them. So help us maybe think through how those flows turn into management fees over the kind of next 12 months? And then more broadly, are there other retail dedicated products you're thinking about and kind of what's in the lab, what's in the pipeline?

Sure. Alex, thanks for the question. Look, we continue to be encouraged by the flows that we're seeing certainly O-rent as well, but your focus for the question, at least Canoe it -- we're particularly excited about the growth opportunity and alternative credit. We've done a lot there already. We have a big pipeline. We have a 20-plus year track record there. We think this is 1 of the biggest interval funds out there already, and we're only 1 year out. So the opportunity set there is very large for us. And the management fees will continue. We have -- I think in 4Q, the offset goes down to the zero.

You'll see a partial offset for the interval fund in -- and then as you roll this out, we do see wealth products coming to market over the next 6, 12, 18 months. There's some interesting things that we've been working on that we'll talk more about in the coming quarters. But we are very focused on expanding our presence there. We already have a diversified set of products there, and it's only going to become more diversified. So we're encouraged there.

And I think it's important to note that when we look at products like Owl CX and ODI they're very small today in terms of inflows. Now they've been very successful in terms of the total capital raise, they're big participants in the market, so they're important. But actually, the farms flow is there, just to clarify, are very modest. In fact, you are saying consequential in the context of our business today. But what's happening to be more specific as we are broadening now the distribution of those products. Safe to say the first 6 months of this year were not the time. The platform was saying, "Great. This would be a really unique time to go out and roll out some new products.

So that's what started to be kind of build back up again is the broadening of that distribution, the broadening of the product suite, as you asked, you'll see us, I think, come with some equity-related products. I mentioned Bos before as an example of a place where we have a really distinctive capability that is so on trend with where market correctly is allocated in TE dollars. So it's much more about the forward opportunity set than it is about anything we're experiencing today. And that, again, speaks more to the acceleration opportunity going forward, not about today's results.

Our next question comes from the line of Mike Brown from KBW. .

Thinking about the $31 billion here, can you talk a little bit about how the deployment will be kind of different in credit versus real assets -- in real assets, I guess, maybe focus a little more there since you already touched on the credit side. And then with digital infrastructure on 4 coming through, can you maybe just touch on the cadence of the closes fee activation and then any potential co-investment demand there?

Sure. We're certainly seeing -- we've been doing -- we continue to see a lot of co-invest interest in what we're doing in digital infrastructure and what we're doing specifically in data centers. We've continued to close a number of SMAs and co-invest vehicles alongside some of our existing fundraise vintages. As we continue to go here, we pointed to back end of this year, back half of this year for the first close of the next vintage that fundraising will go through 2027, I would expect into early 2028.

And so that will have its normal cadence. We continue to be excited about that. We continue to have $10 billion as our goal that we think is achievable. In deployment in net lease or the $31 billion, that breaks out mostly across credit, direct lending, ALT credit and net lease. The net lease, we're actively, I touched on that as you pointed out. We are actively doing capital calls. We have line of sight for Fund VI to be fully called. We've already been doing calls on the existing current vintage. Direct lending, we're going to continue to see, it's going to matter where the deployment happens across our direct lending vehicles.

Right now, we're running at roughly net 0 deployments, not different than what we are seeing out across our peers. And we'll see what the M&A environment looks like over the next 6, 12 months. But as that picks up over time, you'll certainly see our net deployment continue to pick up. Maybe more overall, Mike, just to think about the dialogue today, your question and some other questions. We are certainly seeing an inflection point in our business today.

Again, just broad picture here. We saw redemptions down in 2Q versus 1Q. We saw inflows trough for our May 1 close. Still have a ways to go there but progress. We touched on already today quarter-over-quarter sequential growth in our management fees in 3Q and in 4Q. We see the growth rate for management fees higher in 2027 than in 2026. And we just touched on this, we see a lot happening with our fundraises across our platforms. We've got follow-on vintages, new products, new strategies. We really are seeing a lot of success here. We just touched on deployment. -- deployment is strong in net lease and digital infrastructure and alternative credit.

And most importantly, and Mark touched on this in his opening remarks, we continue to see strong performance returns for products across our platforms. So generally, we're pretty sober about where we are today in the last 6 or 8 months. We are optimistic about growth increasing as we go from here.

Your next question comes from the line of Benjamin Budish from Barclays Capital.

This is another quarter of pretty strong administrative and transaction fees despite a more muted direct lending environment. it looks like real assets. I think the messaging was like maybe Q1 was a little elevated, but it looks like that was strong again in Q2. And then in GPS, you had a little bit of a sequential step up. So just curious if you could talk about what's going on there. Obviously, on the credit side, maybe that will be more dependent on what's going on in the direct lending market, but should we otherwise be seeing more of a structural step-up going forward? If you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the other segments of the business, that would be helpful. .

Sure, of course. We continue to see good -- as we do in direct lending, you see transaction fees come through that's been modest this year. That goes along with the ultimately gross deployment that you see. We continue to see interesting opportunities in real estate credit. So very similar on the direct, very similar as direct lending on the real estate credit side. We have transaction opportunities there. 1Q, we had a good quarter. 2Q, we, I think, put up relatively similar results. You could see that building a little bit over time as we go here. And we continue to see good opportunities in the marketplace. .

Your next question comes from the line of Will Maberdis from Raymond James.

Could you talk a little bit about GP AUM and credit. Curious why we saw that go down a little bit given the dry powder? And do you see opportunities to offset outflows by leaning into institutional fundraising .

Sure. So for fee paying AUM, we raised a lot of institutional dollars in 2Q, Wilma. So about 75% of our fund raise in the quarter was institutional. That goes generally straight over to AUM not yet earning fees, which we've seen increased by about $3 billion since year-end. So that incremental $3 billion since year-end, that's about $55 million of annualized management fees that gets put into that queue for as we deploy it, that starts to get opened up, if you will.

So direct lending, obviously, net deployment has been light. In net lease, we saw the capital call activity. We've talked about that. So that is starting to get deployed. But overall, when you see a lot of institutional dollars raised, that goes generally straight over to the AUM not yet earning fees, and then as it gets deployed, that starts getting put into the management fee growth rate.

And we are indeed seeing good institutional interest in private credit and direct lending. So to your point, again, we look to build both versus sort of, so to speak, the offset and expect we can build both on the individual side and on institutional, but institutional, we have some quite large mandates that are very advanced. So yes, institutional interest has picked up, and we expect that to benefit us. .

And that concludes our question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Marc Lipschultz for some final closing comments.

Thank you very much. I think for us, look, we are excited about the inflection from here. We're pleased with the results for this quarter, but considering the atmospherics that have surrounded it. And most importantly, performance of the underlying products is extremely strong. Job 1 is to deliver for our LPs. We will never lose sight of job 1 and job 1 will lead to great results for our shareholders. Diversification, you can see the power of how many new businesses we have built successfully to real scale. .

We like the direct lending business. But remember, it's now 35% of our assets and the products that have been kind of most acute focus, they've probably been 90% of the narrative are actually 11% on of our prepaid assets, which is the wealth products in direct lending. And so you can see the benefits and power of the diversification across our 3 platforms. And that brings to durability of the firm in total with both the results we have and the results we see forthcoming. So we'll continue to push forward on managing that, which is controllable. And what exogenous things are helpful. Well that we look forward to that being additive. But we are excited looking into the back half and into 2027 from here, and I appreciate the time today.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Good morning. My name is Patrick Davitt. I'm the U.S. asset managers analyst at Autonomous Research. It's my pleasure to welcome back Blue Owl's Co-CEO, Marc Lipschultz. As a reminder, if you want to ask any questions, you can do it through the pigeonhole portal, and they will show up on my iPad here, and I'll try to work them in. Marc, thanks for joining us.

Great being here. I appreciate the opportunity. .

So as I usually do at this event, given we've had most of the major alternative manager, CEOs, I want to start a little higher level. It's obviously been another crazy winter and spring. It feels like every year we're here. It's been a crazy winter and spring this time, particularly acute for you given the private credit freaked out, but also concerns around sticky inflation, higher for longer rates, slowing economic growth, kind of a toxic mix, it feels like for levered risk assets.

So maybe -- but potentially incrementally positive for private credit. So do you agree with the concerns that are out there? And what is your current thinking on inflation rates in the economy and how Blue Owl is positioned given this kind of macro overlay?

Yes. Well, it's great to be here and the gathering you all pulled together here over the last few days, which obviously credit to autonomous and to you. And it does, of course, give us all a chance to hear from lots of folks. Yes, look, it's an uncertain environment. And at some level, the markets are behaving like it's not an uncertain environment, and that combination is always disconcerting. And that's not a directional point of view.

Look, we don't trade in the public markets as we don't invest in the public markets. And I think importantly, to your point about that combination, whether it's a toxic combination or at least a combination that would lead you to think, geez, there's a lot of paths from here that we could be on, to me, which I might frame it a little more in the latter, is actually kind of what we're purpose-built for.

So on the one hand, I'll say, I'll share some perspective based on the ground up of the 400 companies and real estate assets and GP stakes and the businesses we see through, but we make it our business to not be in a business of having to have a directional view on something like what will rates be in point of fact, of course, as you know, in the credit business, the whole purpose is to be insulated from that. In fact, for years, it's been up the rate cycle is about to turn and it's been wrong every single time.

Now from where we have sat over the last several years and said this, I think, last year when we were here, we thought higher for longer was the likely reality. Now that's not because we saw war in Iran. But we did see a continuing strong economy, and we continue to see that. We continue to see cost pressures on companies. And maybe the AI innovation will start to roll over some version of productivity. But in any case, sitting here today, there's definitely a lot of upward pressure.

We could certainly, I think, probably all agree, there's not a lot of easy downward pressures on rates. And so that does play well to the direct lending and credit business. But more to the point, as I said, when I think about course of economy of again share of view, we see continued great strength. Our portfolio average performance of a company, high single-digit revenue, high single-digit EBITDA growth, even better than that, perhaps we can call it ironic or not in software.

We'll come back to that topic, I'm sure. But in any case, great underlying strength and a lot of obvious macro pressures on rates. So put that together, I think that's why we have tried to build a firm that's all about durable performance through a range of outcomes. And that applies in the most mathematically obvious sense to credit. But actually, I would say something like triple net lease is the most durable possible strategy, which is, frankly, right now, a place where we see enormous opportunity. And again, it's built to be really attractive and predictable through a wide range of different paths forward on rates, on the economy, on the dynamics in that case and the dynamics in tech, of course, has a whole different dynamic around it.

So I think I start with a view of I'm glad we don't have to take a view to make our strategies work, but we certainly would land on economic strength looks good, outlook looks good for the U.S. economy and rates are likely to be sticky.

Yes. On the higher for longer conversation, it's obviously more pertinent now in my investor conversations. And I think there's a little misunderstanding on how your portfolio in particular works. So maybe help us understand how we should think about refinancing risk in the portfolio in a higher for longer environment.

So the thing about the credit business writ large, Blue Owls, but it applies to all of our peers. Look, we have very, very large diversified portfolios with a wide range of different maturities. And so we've been through all the last -- you just paint the point every time we sit down here, we seem to think, "Wow, look at what's going on" and it's true, take a 5-year trip to the world, starting with the pandemic and then 0 rates and then hyperinflationary rates and then a trade war and then an actual war, we forgot to run on the banks in Silicon Valley Bank.

I mean this has not been a calm time, even if I took a step back, it kind of has this directional semi- up and to the right look to it, certainly in the equity markets. So I think when we look at our portfolios, our purpose is to be durable to a wide range of different outcomes with multiple businesses. We have a real assets business, our fastest-growing business.

That's ultimate in predictability, durability, 20-year leases with investment-grade parties and now in, frankly, extraordinary growth mode because of the digital infrastructure build. Credit will obviously, again, spend more time on. But here's a business where we have hundreds of loans to get to your point. And they've been maturing all along for the -- I love the term the freak out, by the way, saying that's probably pretty accurate.

It's not because there isn't a worthy conversation to have, but no one to have a worthy conversation. People just wanted to just start sort of lighting their hair on fire and talking about -- which I can't do and talking about like, "Oh, it's '07", I mean just kind of the -- honestly, these kind of crazy comments. And it did create a hysteria, which is pretty unhealthy.

But remember this, that very same time this last quarter, we had $6 billion of loans repaid. So what was supposed to be like the end of the world in credit is a time where we're getting lots of loans repaid. So you hit these maturities all along the way, and there's a lot of ways they get addressed.

Remember, we're the lender, not the equity owner. These maturity wall comments are sure. Of course, we're part of that conversation. We're a partner with these companies, but they're not -- to put it frankly, it's not our wall. It's the owners' walls. It's the private equity firm's walls, it's the corporate wall. They're the ones that go over the wall. If you don't go over that wall, well, then we're going to own the company. It's not our preferred outcome.

We do it successfully. So I think that it's not to say that the idea of a wall is miscast, but especially in private markets, there's a lot of ways to address maturities, including if a company is performing, then you just extend the loan. And I don't mean that in the -- everyone likes to talk about like the extend and pretend part. That's not what I'm talking about.

So if you have a performing company and a performing partnership, then why wouldn't you carry forward? And we often have new loans are actually people buying a company from another sponsor, and they come to us and say, well, you know this company, and we know you, why don't you finance our purchase? So there becomes this sort of internal almost captive audience -- and a lot of our financings are actually now captive into our system.

Got it. So the other issue that's been, I think, particularly acute for you guys is retail flows. And it looks like the gross flow picture, particularly for direct lending products is tracking much lower in 2Q versus 1Q. So what are you hearing from distributors on the demand algorithm for those products, for your direct lending products for your broader retail suite through this ongoing volatility?

So maybe I'll start with a bit of a metaphorical image that I find helpful and actually accurate, I believe, in the context of the whole retail wealth channel topic. If you think about this sort of -- again, I'll use your term, the freak out around private credit.

What really -- what that translated into was picture like taking a rock and tossing it into the middle of a pond. And where it splash, it was a pretty meaningful splash. And then you have these ripples of rings that have come out from it. And there's a lot to like about what I'm out to say, which is actually the splash was pretty abrupt.

And to your point, fundraising for direct lending across the board is clearly down in Q2, we don't see the monthly numbers versus Q1. And I imagine will remain in some depressed fashion for some period of time. It just takes time to heal just like that splash. The splash is quicker than the ripples all disappear. But the ripples are pretty accurate.

As soon as you moved away from that center of gravity, the effects were quite dissipated. So we saw much less of this, for example, in alternative credit, asset-backed credit, move a ring out and get to something like real assets, real assets is thriving. I mean, sure, there's a ripple everywhere. Wealth had a tough first quarter writ large because you just had current months because people are just saying, "Oh, I wonder what this all means."

But if you take a product like ORENT, we have, by far, the biggest net fundraiser in all of real estate. And it took a modest dip down in monthly flows and very modest. And redemptions, in fact, were the lowest we had in 6 quarters. So the ripple, even a couple of layers out was already meaningfully dissipated.

And we're already seeing, and I think now to cover both -- the whole ripple pond, we're actually already seeing it dissipate and a total change in tone. Now nothing happens fast. Again, the splash is bigger than the time it takes for the water to settle, but we're already seeing a total change in tone. We are -- people are interested in investing again across the board.

Certainly, we've already seen the recovery in products away from direct lending. But direct lending conversations are now, "Oh, I'm interested." Again. It's not the same freakout conversation. And in fact, we'll come on to I'm sure the redemption topic.

A lot of people have -- we're already seeing a change in tone there, too. It's not about I can't wait for the next redemption window. I'm sure that we should all logically conclude that there'll be elevated redemptions for pick your period of time, the rest of the year, there'll be moderated inflows for the rest of the year. But actually, I think the super cycle is already behind us.

So to that point, it sounds like when you're talking to the CIO level, people at the [ Merrills ] of the world that there's no kind of I guess, concern around allocating to Blue Owl products versus someone else's product?

No. And again, I think there's also an element of sophisticated more than one might expect delineation between different kinds of products, product that people are -- again, we get it. People are got induced into anxiety, falsely, by the way, I mean we just turned in our April returns for that very -- our main products, the core product in the wealth space. And guess what?

The returns in April were 120 basis points. Again, remember, supposed to be the end of the world, positive 120 basis points. The number of new nonaccruals in the first quarter, 0. 0. Now 0 is as maybe anomalous a number as if it was 4. I mean there could be some like that's normal in our business, but 0. We are the only major BDC that has declining nonaccruals. Our nonaccruals are way below 1% in CIC.

So it's just the facts don't comport with the -- and people get that. And I will say this, the institutions, the FAs, the CIOs, just was with one of the CIOs of a major platform yesterday, they -- that's not where the freakout happened. They totally get the way these products work. And they're telling people, you shouldn't be redeeming. In fact, you should be investing.

You're only going to fight that so much down at the FA level with a client, as I understand. But so again, the credit and the stability of the ultimate trajectory here, the platforms get it and so do most of the clients. Remember, if you look at the redemptions and that -- again, I'll keep coming back to this core income product that's really our one main wealth product in the credit side, the continuously offered version. Remember, in that product in this last quarter, half of the redemption requests were from 1% of the investors.

So it's not a broad-based phenomenon. It's actually -- and that itself turns out to be explicable and why was that 1% what it was. So I think actually, the platforms feel very good about the product, the products. They feel good about [ Owl ] and our peers. And again, there's more similar than different. I'm not here to talk about how fabulous the blow credit product is and what immediate neighbors aren't, generally, the sector is in a healthy place.

Yes. So the other side of the coin, to your point, is the redemption requests. Everyone is, I think, basically assuming that will be more than 5% for at least the rest of the year. But like you just said, it sounds like the vast majority of those requests are coming from a very small group of the shareholders. So if that ratio kind of maintains, like how long will it take to get below 5%?

Look, it's obviously speculation, and I don't have a direct answer. So what I try to do is frame a couple of inputs to that outcome. So I am with you, look, why wouldn't we all logically assume that it's going to be a 5% level for a period of time in these products that just seems like a logical way to proceed for the short term in any case. But the tone actually is healing faster than even I would have expected.

I think it's partly explicable in this regard. Well, part of it is performance. There never was a performance problem. That's a big difference. And in fact, performance is strong, not even like performance is okay. Now we've got 5 years in this product and the performance we delivered over a 9% return and you get it every month.

So there's a couple of inputs for people to think about when they're trying to figure out where the inflection occurs. Well, performance is strong, that accounts for a lot. People get to see that and experience it, and this is important, every month.

Remember, continuous products are a monolith. Strategies are a monolith, obviously. And in this product, in particular, you get your return every month. It's not an IOU. It's not, "Oh, I promise, you're doing great." I'm telling you, like don't worry, you're making a fabulous return. By the way, the only you can get that is you go ask for your money. Here, we send you your money every month. So you're actually, as an investor, getting a reminder every month that the strategy is working exactly as it was before.

And in fact, with rates higher, actually, the returns are likely to be supported at a higher level. So I think that is another encouraging fact for healing. So then you can kind of say, well, what's the inside, what's the outside? So the sooner the better in terms of getting down below these redemption request levels.

But we can look at the other side and say, well, like what -- I don't want to call it the worst case, obviously. But there's a data point out there in BREIT when you had a product that actually had a performance problem, had a liquidity challenge, had genuine negative issues that it had to work through.

And that took 6-ish quarters. So you kind of have a little bit of a bracketing like if you have a lot of issues, we know kind of what that looked like. And we don't really know what it looks like when you have this, there's no actually performance issues, but a lot of psychological concern. So somewhere between those 2 will lie the inflection.

But I said, I don't really see the benefit of being heroic in one's assumptions. It will take a little time for people to settle back down and get back below those 5% redemptions. But here's one other thing I want to say, the 5% model works. Again, not trying to be a pollyanna, but I am trying to also find what we've learned from all this.

It worked really well, like for all the panic, right, the run on the bank and all the things in the hysteria, at 5%, it works really -- we took in $3 billion of loan repayments. We had $1 billion that went out the door for redemptions. The system is a net cash generator just based on loan repayments, let alone the $11 billion plus of liquidity we have on hand.

And so the structures are incredibly durable and predictable. And if we think about healthy long-term growth, it'd be hard to imagine there's no one -- there's anyone left that doesn't understand that when we say semi-liquid, it's semi-liquid, not fully liquid.

And I hope now it would be hard to find someone to get that. We always said it, but you don't know how people absorbed it, and we've all talked to the clients, the FAs do. But that's a healthy fact for long-term growth. And the last comment on that point because I know this is a topic of great interest to all of us in retail in general. If you take a step back, sort of compared to what, and this gets back to like what's the proposition.

The proposition is to benefit from certain private strategies and the premium returns we deliver. We've delivered a 300 basis point premium to the liquid credit market during that same 5-year period to the leveraged loan market, 500 basis points to high yield. That's a heck of an additional return on top of those liquid strategies. And indeed, you have to give up some of your liquidity. But what does that really look like?

What it's looked like is of 20 quarters for CIC, in 19 of them, people got the money the minute they asked for it. And in 1 quarter, the darkest corner that we could all see and we know what we went through, people got 25% of their money back. And if all things stayed the same, which I don't think they are based on what we're seeing, that would take you a year to get all your money back on that basis.

Compared to a fund where you put your money in and 10 years later, you get your money. I mean, that's actually a tremendous proposition. It worked. And I think at the end of the day, if we all digest that, not we, but I think as the market digests that, it means this is a really, really healthy way for people to use privates intelligently as part of their portfolios.

That's helpful. So I guess broadening out on the retail topic, where -- can you update us on where you are broadening out the distribution footprint for each of the products? And then beyond that, what does the new product development pipeline look like?

Sure. So the products all follow a curve and the curve is relatively predictable, which is kind of number of launch points, number of FAs that use them and then one person told a friend, they told a friend. And they all kind of follow this directional curve impacted for sure in an environment like this changes the front end of that curve. But we're working through those curves in our core products. So let's take a few categories.

So the core income product is, let's call it, fully distributed, right? That's not a story about broader distribution. It is about broader adoption in the short term. It's not in the short term, it's obviously about reversing this drop-off in use. So that's in its one category. Then you have the category like introduced one of the bigger and more important launches, successful product, which is our asset-backed product.

And that product is now in its kind of -- it's got a few points of distribution, points of distribution are broadening, adoption is coming along. So that one is in the kind of the low period, had one of the biggest starts, which is great. And now we got to get to the power point in the curve. Go to something in the middle like in ORENT, our real estate product.

And there's one where you have generally broad but not complete distribution and a product that is thriving and more and more people adopting it. So now you're in kind of -- I might call it the sweet spot, right? CIC is kind of up here in the more call it, the mature end relative to continuously offered products.

And over here in the nascent then, you have like the digital infrastructure product and the asset-backed product, you have to like ORENT that lives in the middle and is really powering up that curve of broader distribution, more use. So we have products in each stage of life, which I think is part of how we support our continued business development.

Okay. That's helpful. So I want to move to credit more broadly. Obviously, direct lending specifically is kind of the press's favorite foil, it feels like almost every year at this point. But as the economy potentially slows, rates remain high, where do you see the biggest risk of something breaking in these portfolios? Or do you think the attention should be focused somewhere else entirely?

Yes, it's funny you said like it's been years of -- that's it, private credit. Oh, that's it. Private credit. And like I can't help but come back to the other Mark Twain, right? Like the new [indiscernible] was an exaggeration. And it does have that like groundhog version of it.

And so let me just take a step back and say that in private credit, a couple of things. Let's talk about the underlying credits and then let's talk about the structures because either of those places can cause a problem for any product. And we've seen both happen in the world across different asset classes. I already started the comment, but I'll reinforce the comment.

Credit quality remains really high. And that is not to suggest that there are not problems and won't be problems. We should all agree there will be problems, and it will now include software companies that 3 years ago, none of us would have thought would have been on the list of places where there'll be some problems. But our business to be prepared for that.

And remember, we're the lender to your second question. So in a software company, we started on average at 30% of the value of an enterprise, 40% if it's a non-software company. So the structure, we'll come on to matters. So there's two kinds of structures. First, there's credit. Credit is strong. And I also say that in the world of credit, we have a lot of visibility.

This is a -- and you know this, it's a slow-moving process because you don't go from average companies performing in the high single digits and well below 1% nonaccruals in a quarter to, "Oh my gosh, what a bunch of problems you've got." Like there's a long journey through I'm doing fine, not doing so fine, doing poorly, and amendment.

And so we see -- just like indicators. It's not like trying to read the tea leaves, you'll go through a gate. The gate will be, "Hey, can I have an amendment"? The gate will be, "Hey, I need some relief." The gate will be, "Hey, I've used my revolver." Like all that happens before someone says, I'm out. And so we know -- so in the foreseeable future, and this is not just us, I'm confident it will be true, but large cap peers.

Small cap is a different business. Large cap peers, there's not going to be some rapid shift in credit quality. So we've got a very nice horizon for some period of time. Now 2 years out, obviously, who knows what the state of the world will be. So credit quality, strong and for the foreseeable future, I expect will remain very strong. Now let's go to structure. Two things about structure. There's a structure of what we do itself, which is we're the debt, not the equity. And so you also have to eat through all that equity to get to the debt.

Somehow we did the press, and I don't want to just put it on the press, the press is reflecting like guys, but they certainly have amplified it, is this -- like someone we left past all the equity and said, let's talk about private credit. And then somehow by putting the word private in front of it, we thought it made something different from credit.

All of that is just misplaced. It doesn't mean there isn't a conversation to have. But private credit is credit. It doesn't trade, credit where you do more due diligence, credit where you have a tighter document. And so we have lots of history and lots of data about credit. And the liquid credit market, where all of a sudden, we articles about private credit, but ignoring this adjacent market that has the credit in many cases, none of us wanted to do. Not all of them, not being damned of it.

We have to have a good healthy ecosystem, and I love that we have a healthy private market and public market. But ones with looser documentation for sure, that we know. Some great companies there, too. But like somehow, we weren't talking about that, we're talking here. So structure matters, we're credit. And we're senior secured credit above a lot of equity. So we left that.

And then last point on structure is where do the loans sit because you get to points that could break. So what do I really think could -- is there something that could break the system. It's not the credit quality, and we have very diverse portfolios.

And even when you do math on extreme stress tests on portfolios, you don't break anything. You end up with lesser returns than you would have wanted. Remember, we run 10 years at a 13 basis point average loss rate. And we've said this every time I open my mouth. Of course, that's not the sustainable and durable and predictable rate. But it doesn't matter, multiply that by a bunch of times and start with a 9-something percent return.

That's not a problem. Then you have -- so credit, let's take that, that looks pretty strong. So then we go to structures. And the structures, we just talked about the structures are enormously durable. You aren't going to break the structures on the basis of 5% redemptions in any well-managed BDC. I'm not saying somebody out there and the fringes can't create a problem. I am and in fact, saying you should pay attention to people's right-hand balance sheets, right?

That everyone talks about credits and a lot of people tend to skip over like, have you done the right job constructing the right side? We spend a lot of time on that, a lot of time. And that's powerful, too. So again, I'm not saying you can't mess things up. But at 5% redemption levels in a diversified portfolio with loans coming in and everyone well-managed fund has liquidity, you're not going to break it there either.

And there's only one turn of leverage on those books. So is there anything I would characterize as, gosh, that's what keeps me up at night in terms of a big problem? No, lots of things keep me up at night about each loan and each decision and the marketplace. And certainly, what kept me up for a period of time was "Oh my, what article I get through each month." That definitely kept me up at night.

That still keeps me up at night.

Yes. You and me both.

Okay. That's helpful. I want to move to deployment. So there's -- we're always talking about this tug of war between the broadly syndicated market and the direct lending market. It sounds like from the 1Q earnings calls from you and others that there's a better pipeline building. So through that lens, how has your pipeline been tracking? And are you still seeing the trend of better terms in terms of like wider spreads and better dots?

Yes. Terms of -- the one thing you would predictably expect in an environment like this is that spreads have widened. And credit quality has been high throughout. In this case, I'll speak very much for Blue Owl. We never compromised credit quality. Didn't, won't. That's just -- there's no loan worth it. There's not, right? We looked at 10,000 loans to select the ones that will be more than that that we've selected.

There's not a loan on earth that's worth doing for us on a stretch basis. Why? I mean you get paid S plus 550, S600, it wouldn't matter, make it S700, not that that's on offer today for a quality loan. None of that is going to compensate for making a bad loan. And that's why I think our portfolio has proven to be, again, perhaps ironic given the press conversation, one of the very best credit qualities with those most durable performance because that's the choice we have always made and always will make. Spreads have widened.

That's a good thing. Like this is a good environment to be making new loans. Not a run, don't walk environment. Like in a way, I would characterize it more as a return to a normal spread where spread probably got overcompressed a bit during like prior to 6 months, 6 months before all this noise started. So I sort of said this, I think that spreads in our market undulate. And you undulate up to the high zone during '22, '23 when the public market is very restrained.

And you undulate down into the lower zone when the public market is more aggressive or markets in general, like in part of '24 into '25. And now we're back, I think, probably into the middle zone. We have a functioning public market. We have generally a reasonable risk appetite in the market, maybe if we are talking unreasonable in certain places.

And so I think now our spreads are in a nice, healthy equilibrium state. Deal flow is low. I mean, to be clear, right, M&A activity for sponsors is low. Now hopefully, with the same noise lifting and the markets as strong as they are, one would logically expect activity to be picking up. But the first quarter where everyone thought, okay, quarter 1 would be -- speaking for the PE firms, quarter 1 would be the time.

Obviously, PE activity wasn't enormously high in quarter 1. Now that's in contrast to what we're seeing in a world of digital infrastructure where the numbers are just breathtaking and moving at rates none could possibly contemplated or comprehended. So the PE activity level, if you said what's the one thing you would like in direct lending, yes, I'd like more activity because the more things we get to pick from, the better.

For sure. All right. Turning to move away from credit. Obviously, there's a lot of noise on the direct lending side, but one of the better growth stories for you guys has been real estate, which is a triple net lease business. You guys pitch this as more of a fixed income replacement than real estate equity. So I'd be curious to get your updated thoughts on how that pitch is resonating through the credit noise.

Yes, that pitch is -- well, it's working and the work -- so since it's working, it's delivering and investors have seen that. So -- that's a business, to your point, in our case, our strategies are a very particular type. We do these long-dated leases with very strong counterparties. And so it is a fixed income replacement. Now that has some wonderful tax attributes.

So and I call it an enhanced fixed income solution. Take like our ORENT product. The ORENT product has a -- we raised the yield. It has a 7% current yield and delivered last year an 11% return. It's delivered over a 9% return since inception of that product. And the counterparties are investment-grade counterparties.

And then it turns out you can do better than that in this environment when you have the privilege of working with the hyperscalers on these monstrous projects where it takes deep technical skills to be their chosen partner. So in that area, we've got as large a pipeline as we have basically ever experienced in triple net lease writ large and probably $100 billion pipeline working on in the digital infrastructure space.

So that place is working most importantly for the investors. I always start with does it work for the LP, and it does. And then can we marry them with a user of capital. Well, in this case, the answer is absolutely yes. And we're seeing, therefore, the demand. So ORENT continues to be a very, very successful thriving net fundraiser in the wealth channel. And our institutional product, as you know, we raised our record institutional flagship fund and triple net lease only a little over a year ago.

We're already into and headed toward our hard cap in our next iteration of that product with tremendous investor interest. Those products where, in addition to doing what I described, buy and hold the asset, we there also often sell them because once you have a fully developed asset and corporate partners is happy with how it's all set up, then you can sell it on to insurance companies or other real estate funds that are, call them equity funds, maybe they're core funds. And so in that product suite and triple net lease over its life, we've generated over a 20% return doing these long-dated commitments from incredibly strong counterparties. I consider that really pretty special.

And on the call, you pointed to what sounded like a particularly strong deployment pipeline. Maybe update us on that and what the nature of that pipeline looks like.

Yes. That pipeline is -- continues to be incredibly strong and things keep moving through it. Our deployment in that area is very, very strong. In fact, our current triple net lease fund is nearly fully committed at this point. And our digital infrastructure fund, also Fund III, which itself was a record fund is nearly fully committed, and we'll be back with that product.

And so the pipeline there, again, I'll now focus for a moment on maybe the topic of a little more specific interest, digital infrastructure is monumental. And it's not a surprise, right? If you take a market that take the 5 hyperscalers that matter, and then I'll add a sixth company NVIDIA because NVIDIA is now doing some of their own infrastructure and safe to say, we like their credit, too.

And we work with all of these -- all the hyperscalers. There -- we all know what they have reported. They went from, I don't know, $50 billion of CapEx cumulatively between all of them a few years ago to $700 billion this year, probably going to $1 trillion. When that happens in a market and then when you have a finite number of people, because a lot of people will correctly say, but isn't there a lot of people that want to invest in this area?

Yes, there are a lot of people that want to invest in it. That's good news. But there's very, very few who are actually qualified and equipped to then be the partner to those companies to actually build the projects. Now once we build, develop and deliver the capacity, there's a lot of buyers.

But today, you go to Amazon and you go to Microsoft and you go to Oracle, Google, Meta, there's a tiny list of people, and we're one of the premier ones that they're actually going to work with because we have 1,000 people that do this inside of our operations group, and we've done it a 100 times over. Over the last little over a year, we have done 4 greater than $10 billion hyperscale projects. And almost every large hyperscale project done when the third parties involved has been ours.

And they just -- the scale is breathtaking. You think about the Hyperion project down in Louisiana, which is Meta project in Louisiana. It's a 2-gigawatt project, and let's contextualize that. Denver, the city of Denver uses 1 gigawatt of power.

So 2 Denvers of power, the land mass it's built on is the size of Manhattan. It costs $30 billion to build the physical part we're doing with them, the part that we can own. $30 billion project in nominal dollars, I haven't done all the real dollar adjustments, I think, is the single largest capital project ever undertaken on the face of the earth. And that's the cheap part. That's the cheap part.

The expensive part is what they're going to put inside that infrastructure, by the way, another nice feature when you're a landlord when someone moves $90 billion worth of equipment into your buildings because that's what they'll do. So that project, one project is a $100 billion program down in Northwest Louisiana, and it's one. It's one. We have a gigawatt project going in Abilene, Texas, Stargate. We have a gigawatt project going in New Mexico. This is -- the Amazon project also in Louisiana is just under, I think, the gigawatt, and there's a lot more of those coming.

Some of your competitors on this point, have pointed to a need to only do deals close to large population centers in order to avoid the obsolescence risk. But to your point, you're involved in some rural development. So what makes you comfortable taking that risk when it sounds like others are not willing to take that risk.

Well, others are not willing to take a thing they can't have. So to be clear, I mean, we were with one of the hyperscalers, and they said this actually in a large group, I won't attribute it to them. They said -- someone in the audience said so, you refer to this. They said, so don't you get a lot of people approaching you about doing these data centers.

They said, "Oh, yes, you get a lot." And 85% of it just gets tossed in the trash because we wouldn't do it with them. They don't -- it's not because they don't think they're great firms. They have the ability. And we don't know them. And for us, what we need is this data center built on spec, on time, the sooner the better.

And so there's no way they're taking that risk based on cost of capital. Now so let's talk about that distinction. Data centers also is a monolithic term. If I'm doing a colocation short-term data center, I would agree, and we own a bunch of urban data centers. And they're wonderful to have because if you're right in the heart of Atlanta as we are and you have the key hub, it's a great asset.

However, that has to do with the nature for us of who's the user on what term lease. If you have a colocation data center and you're counting on people to re-lease it, absolutely, I agree with that statement. Absolutely. We don't do that business. So if you're in that business, you're right, you better stay close to an urban center.

We leased our projects for 20 years, 17 to 20 years at a time to 1 of 5 now, maybe 6 different companies who have, on average, AA credit ratings. There is no terminal question. I mean, sure, we can all talk about 20 years from now, what will they do inside those buildings. But frame it this way. When we go into these investments, we do them in a way where if you even assumed all of that infrastructure, that $30 billion of infrastructure that was built was worthless, you still have a good investment.

And if you assume it has a very small residual value in nominal dollars, 20 years later, inflation adjusted, well, then you're making your double-digit returns. And if you actually ends up having some meaningful useful life, well, then off to the races and we don't have to worry about all the upside cases. And then I'll just make this qualitative comment. None of us in this room know what 20 years from now, all that will look like, like a silly exercise. But I will observe this about the part we build.

And you've visited these sites and those who haven't, it's worth doing, and by the way, we're happy to host anybody who wants to know it's really something to see. What is it that we deliver? We deliver power, reliable backed up power that can never go out 24/7, 365. And when you take power and you convert it to any known technology, again, 20 years from now, you produce heat. Has to happen, right?

That's what happens. You take energy and you convert it to a digital activity. So what do we really have? We spent $30 billion producing a massive power input, cooling output, always reliable piece of infrastructure. And what's important to remember is this, -- it doesn't really matter to us if there's 40,000 chips in one data hall as there is today. Or in some mystical world 20 years from now, it's one mega chip that sits in the middle of that like almost a sci-fi movie you go in and there's one little chip in the middle.

It still takes the 2 gigawatts of power, produce it's physics, right?

At the end of the day, no energy is created or destroyed. And so the energy is produced, the heat is produced, and we have to take it away. So I would actually say if you want to go into do wild speculation about 20 years from now, you still need the power, you still need the cooling, whatever sits in the middle of it.

So I think there's a lot to like about that. And again, importantly, I do find people, oh yes, I'm not comfortable being in Louisiana. I wouldn't want to own that. Oh, that's -- I don't know about that data center. I honestly ask yourself, really. I mean you really don't want to be an owner of a 20-year 8 cap rate product to a AA counterparty with rent escalators at a rock solid lease. You really don't want that. I'm pretty sure you do.

There's a question from the audience on that. Like how do you evaluate the hyperscalers' ability to stick to their obligations given the revenue to kind of back how much they're committing is not there yet? And are you just relying on their credit rating and name brand to kind of go?

Well, we're really relying for sure on their credit rating. These are all -- I mean, often complicated structures. But at the end of it is a commitment from the corporate user. And this is where our triple net lease experience is so deeply valuable.

So maybe data centers are like a newish idea to people. And this triple net long-dated lease is a little newish that people -- but it's 15 years of what we've done in triple net lease. And like in every business, yes, look, you learn through mistakes that happen over the course of time. Now you don't want people doing those mistakes on your dollar on a $30 billion project. So yes, definitely tread carefully with who you invest with.

But what we've done is over 15 years, figure out exactly how to write those leases. And by the by, we have watched leases other people have signed. And they have some holes. It doesn't mean it will be a problem, but they're not ideal. And I like to think we have done leases that we -- nothing is perfect.

You can fight over anything you want to fight over. But we know a lot about having done it. I think we have 3,000 properties that have done triple leases on over the course of history. So I'm pretty sure we know how to get those leases to be as air tight as they can be, and that's the key because we're counting on their credit.

Now it's never a good idea to own an asset that is fully uneconomic for its user. That's just a bad idea because you create a bigger and bigger gap to want to get in a fight. But back to my point, they're loading $90 billion of stuff in here. It's not uneconomic. Now whether it was a wise or not wise choice to spend $1 trillion on this infrastructure, I'm underqualified to comment on. If you want to bet on my opinion or you want to bet on Sergey Brin's opinion, bet on Sergey Brin's opinion. Bet on Mark Zuckerberg's opinion. Bet on Larry Ellison's opinion.

These are the most successful tech entrepreneurial -- entrepreneurs of our lifetime, Elon Musk. They all say, this is a great idea and we can't have it soon enough. So I'll defer to them. But in any case, -- that's their decision. They own all the upside, and there is no case. There's no case where these assets don't produce profits. It's only a matter and this is another thing that's lost.

They'll produce revenues, they'll produce profits. Will they produce enough to have made it worth spending the $1 trillion? Well, that I don't know, we'll find out. And so -- and then you have to really be realistic, are we -- Microsoft has a AAA rating. They're going to pay their bills. We're one of their largest landlords in the world. We're Amazon's largest landlord in the world. They're going to pay their bills.

And again, the conversation ends up often migrating to, well, what about Oracle? I mean they have a mere $600 billion market cap. And sure, there's a difference between a BBB credit rating and a AAA credit rating. There might be good credit ratings, but they all have big backlogs of revenue also. And again, it's not 0 or 1. They're going to produce a lot of revenue out of these products.

All right. I want to touch a little bit on your asset-backed business. You acquired a business called Atalaya. It feels like this is through the lens of the direct lending concerns, a business that could see more demand. So how is the demand algorithm tracking for ABF? And given the noise we've seen this year, are you actually seeing that accelerating?

Yes. So ABF -- so let's -- again, I always come back to start with is it working. And it's absolutely working, which is to say the returns and loss experience there has been excellent across the board, both in the funds. So again, here again, we have an opportunistic fund and then we have this adjacent wealth product.

Both are thriving. And in fact, the fund we reported, I think, had a high teens return. And the wealth product is doing great with very, very low rates and great returns. Not all. It's always that there you're ever more built for the idea that asset pools will have things that perform, things that underperform structures and capture that.

So the product is working for the investors. In terms of ramp-up, that's one, as I said, it's very early in introductions. We're just getting it into platforms. And again, back to my ripple point, no doubt, my observation would be direct lending takes most of it, but then you get a ripple out into people don't delineate for some direct lending from private credit.

So I think you saw some muting across all of asset-backed lending as a sector compared to where I call it it should be, and I think we'll get back to much sooner. It didn't go down in the same way either with that sort of acceleration of the curve. You got to pull this haze a little bit off of the term private credit. So that probably like lagged the ramp-up a bit from what I would consider expected or ideal. But interest there is high.

You didn't get the redemption cycle there. So the delineation is already in place. Now you got broad distribution, get adoption. It probably will be the beneficiary if I had to speculate on if people just have a -- I don't know, I just read the direct lending, okay, well, here's a different credit product, gives you the same experience. You don't have to decide if you do or don't like direct lending. So I think we'll actually see movement of dollars over the medium term, probably that direction.

Okay. Great. So taking all this together, I sense investors are a little skeptical of your guide of high single-digit basically fee-related earnings growth this year, particularly given the gross flow dynamics we've seen in the second quarter. So could you put some more meat around that view maybe help kind of lay out the levers you see as providing enough juice to kind of offset the downdraft we've seen in the credit flows?

So let's start with the core business model, fee-based revenues off of permanent capital vehicles for enormous predictability. When we start the year, we know a whole lot about what that year is going to look like.

Funds flows today into a wealth product are largely about next year. And funds flows, this question of inflows, redemptions, absolutely will affect the trajectory. But remember, we manage $315 billion. And when we get down to this funds flow question, we're down here in a corner where we have $23 billion of total NAV, $20 billion in CIC, $3 billion in TIC.

So this is really small. So park that to the side. So we're really talking about in this $20 billion, a 5% outflow is $1 billion. So we're talking about the delta between is -- are you out $1 billion or pick whatever inflow number when things were full throttle and your inflow over $1 billion. So that's the delta. It's a couple of billion dollars, which I don't take lightly, but it's a couple of billion dollars against a $315 billion denominator. And at this point, joined about a part year. So what I would say is that is a very modest input to the 2026 question.

On the other hand, products like the success we're having in raising our next real estate fund and the success we're having in ORENT as kind of a direct offset, same thing on timing, but definitely has money coming in. And as we go out with our digital infrastructure product, those are all bringing in revenues sooner, and we're deploying at rates much higher than logically one would have expected. So there's offsets in there.

A lot of that AUM turns on as deployed.

As deployed. And then we have -- and therefore, as a result, we have $350 million in revenues from funds under management not yet deployed, and we're still raising, obviously, a lot of new funds. So I think the way I would say is this is we are aiming to be predictable as always. We do appreciate the market is a little more uncertain. We do appreciate the picture on things like fundraising will be a little harder to predict for some period of time, mostly because of the wealth topic.

You always have the episodic nature of fund closings and the like. That's not new. So of course, there'll be a little less certainty on fundraising. But when we look out, we have a lot of visibility on our revenues. And look, our job is to keep delivering it for our shareholders.

Okay. Well, I have a lot more I want to talk about, but we're out of time.

Well, we'll take it offline.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you very much, Pat. Appreciate it.

Good morning, and welcome to Blue Owl Capital's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I'd like to advise all parties that this conference call is being recorded.

I will now turn the call over to Ann Dai, Head of Investor Relations for Blue Owl.

Thanks, operator, and good morning to everyone. Joining me today are Marc Lipschultz, our Co-Chief Executive Officer; and Alan Kirshenbaum, our Chief Financial Officer.

I'd like to remind our listeners that remarks made during the call may contain forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future performance or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that are outside the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those described from time to time in Blue Owl Capital's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

We'd also like to remind everyone that we'll refer to non-GAAP measures on the call, which are reconciled to GAAP figures in our earnings presentation available on the Shareholders section of our website at blueowl.com.

Please note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any Blue Owl fund. This morning, we issued our financial results for the first quarter of 2026, reporting fee-related earnings, or FRE of $0.25 per share and distributable earnings or DE of $0.19 per share. We declared a dividend of $0.23 per share for the first quarter payable on May 27 to holders of record as of May 13.

During the call today, we'll be referring to the earnings presentation, which we posted to our website this morning, so please have that on hand to follow along.

With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Marc.

Great. Thank you so much, Ann. As we highlighted this morning in our results for the first quarter of 2026, we operate 3 differentiated platforms at scale, each of which has contributed to Blue Owl's expansion. Revenues increased by 13%, fee-related earnings by 14% and distributable earnings by 11% compared to the first quarter of 2025 against a backdrop of geopolitical uncertainty, interest rate volatility and increased attention to private credit. Our financial results reflect stability driven by our durable capital base and growth, driven by fundraising and ongoing capital deployment. We raised $57 billion of capital over the last 12 months, our second highest capital raise since inception and $11 billion in the first quarter, which represents approximately 14% annualized on our AUM at the end of 2025. These fundraising results reflect investor interest across client channels and across our credit, real assets and GP strategic capital platforms.

In recent months, we spent time with clients and other stakeholders addressing the questions that have arisen around private credit. Our approach has been straightforward, answer those questions with facts. Across the business, fundamental performance remains strong and portfolios remain strong and the portfolios continue to behave in line with the discipline with which they were built. Compared to the last quarter, there's certainly more uncertainty in the macro and geopolitical landscape and investors across all asset classes are faced with more questions than answers about the near-term environment. As we've observed in the past, times of heightened volatility and uncertainty tend to favor those with patient capital and longer duration and market share has moved towards private players during those periods in the past. While we continue to see a healthy balance between the public and private markets, the momentum has shifted in our direction in recent months, offering attractive investment opportunities that we are selectively leaning into.

As it relates to fundraising, we continue to see good interest from a broad range of investors across an increasingly diverse set of strategies, resulting in $11 billion raised across equity and debt platform-wide during the first quarter. Institutional capital represented 2/3 of total equity raised for the first quarter or $6.1 billion. These inflows came from approximately 80 institutional investors with 47% of those commitments coming into our credit platform, 40% in real assets and 13% in GP Strategic Capital. We received commitments from 33 new institutional clients during the quarter and 14 existing Blue Owl investors committed to new strategies, further deepening these relationships.

We took in capital from institutional investors across every major market with an increasing amount coming from non-U.S. investors over the past few years. In our private wealth channel, we raised approximately $3 billion of equity in the first quarter, primarily across net lease, direct lending, alternative credit and digital infrastructure, highlighting that individual investors continue to allocate to alternatives. In particular, demand for real asset strategies has been solid with over $7 billion raised in wealth for real assets over the last 12 months, a 2.5x increase from the prior 12-month period.

Taken together, our fundraising results for the first quarter highlight 3 major takeaways. First, institutional and individual investors continue to allocate to products and strategies across the Blue Owl platform. We think this speaks to our ongoing education efforts with investors through the years and the differentiated returns we have generated as a result of rigorous underwriting, deliberate and thoughtful product construction and scale benefits and ultimately, long-dated strong performance. Second, the evolution and diversification of Blue Owl's platform has been and will continue to be an important driver of fundraising and earnings. So let's explore that briefly.

As you can see on Slide 5 in our earnings deck, today, direct lending represents only 37% of Blue Owl's AUM. To put this in context, real assets is now 27% of AUM and GP Strategic Capital is 22%. Nearly 3/4 of equity capital we've raised over the last 12 months has been outside of direct lending. Alternative credit and net lease have grown their AUM by roughly 40% year-over-year, reflecting strong interest in these asset classes. Our digital infrastructure strategy, which is approximately 6% of AUM today, has significant runway ahead as we face unprecedented demand for data center capacity and continue to work closely with some of the largest, most innovative and best capitalized companies in the world.

In fact, just a couple of months ago, Amazon announced a $12 billion data center campus with investment for Blue Owl's digital infrastructure funds and development by STACK Infrastructure, our scaled designer, developer and operator of sustainable digital infrastructure. This marks the fourth data center project above $10 billion announced in less than 18 months for which Blue Owl will play a critical role. We held the final close in the first vintage of our GP-led secondary strategy, BOSE, during the quarter, above target at approximately $3 billion. We think this is a great outcome for a first-time fund, and it makes us a market leader in dedicated capital raised for GP-led secondaries.

And as it relates to fundraising channels, institutional investors drove 67% of total equity capital raised in the first quarter. And in private wealth, nearly 70% of flows came from real assets, GP Strategic Capital, alternative credit and GP-led secondaries during the first quarter. And these strategies themselves constituted about 60% of private wealth flows over the last 12 months. These figures highlight an increasingly diversified set of high-quality in-demand strategies that offer investors significant income and downside protection.

Finally, it's worth keeping the recent attention on our nontraded BDC flows in perspective. While the level of debate around private credit has resulted in elevated industry-wide redemption requests, the actual impact to Blue Owl's revenues and earnings for the first quarter was quite modest. During the quarter, net outflows of roughly $170 million from OCIC and OTIC were less than 6 basis points of our beginning of period AUM. As a reminder, these 2 funds collectively comprise less than 17% of our total AUM. For OCIC, redemption requests were concentrated with 1% of investors representing the majority of tenders and approximately 90% of the investor base electing not to tender at all. Generally, requests have been more investor-led than adviser-led, highlighting continued strong support from our partners and what we believe has been a headline-driven, not fundamental-driven redemption environment.

And notably, gross repurchases for our net lease non-traded REIT ORENT were less than $134 million compared to inflows of $1.1 billion, resulting in net inflows of approximately $1 billion for the quarter compared to about $8 billion of fee-paying AUM at the end of 2025.

Moving on to performance, which remains resilient across credit, real assets and GP Strategic Capital. Our strategies have delivered attractive absolute returns and on a relative basis, have generally outperformed their public indices since inception through a wide range of economic and market environments. To give a few examples of this. Our direct lending strategy generated gross returns of 8.5% over the last 12 months and more specifically, our largest nontraded BDC OCIC has delivered an attractive 9.1% annualized return over approximately 5 years since inception, demonstrating durability across a range of market environments. Over this period, Class I shares of OCIC have outperformed leveraged loans by more than 300 basis points, high-yield bonds by approximately 500 basis points and traditional fixed income by approximately 900 basis points.

In alternative credit, gross returns of 11% over the last 12 months have compared favorably to leveraged loans as well, outperforming by more than 600 basis points. Our net lease strategy has returned 14.7% over the last 12 months, outperforming the FTSE REIT Index by over 1,100 basis points. And GP minority stakes has delivered outstanding results with net IRRs of between 10% and 34% across Funds III, IV and V. These funds are top quartile of DPI, and we're honored to recently be named the top large buyout firm in 2025 by HEC Paris-Dow Jones in a category of nearly 700 firms, which we think recognizes our outstanding performance across these key metrics.

I mentioned earlier that we were seeing the market move our way as a result of volatility and GP stakes is a good example of this. Not only is fund performance strong, but we have substantial dry powder and the pipeline continues to grow for this business. Bring us back to where I started. Performance remains the clearest measure over time. What matters most in periods like this is whether the portfolios are behaving as expected, whether the underwriting is holding up and whether the structural protections in the business are doing the work they're designed to do. On those measures, the quarter reinforced the stability and durability of the business, supported by continued growth and strong underlying fundamentals. We plan to continue communicating with our stakeholders transparently and candidly and look forward to speaking with all of you in the weeks and months to come.

With that, let me turn it to Alan to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Marc, and good morning, everyone. Today, we reported another quarter of solid earnings growth and broad fundraising across the platform. As Marc noted, during the first quarter, we raised $11 billion of capital across a diverse set of products and strategies.

As you can see on Slide 14, while the first quarter is typically a seasonally lighter quarter for fundraising, we continue to see fundraising across a broader and more diversified platform driven by ongoing diversification across products, strategies and investor base. Compared to the first quarter of last year, equity capital raised grew by 35%. Staying on the theme of 1Q '26 results versus a year ago quarter, management fees were up 13%. You can see on Slide 10 that we broke out management fee offsets this quarter, which we think helps investors get a better sense of the core trends across our business. FRE grew 14% and DE grew 11%. We modestly increased our FRE margin, expanding to 58.4% for the quarter versus our FRE margin for 2025 of 58.3%. AUM not yet paying fees increased to $30 billion, representing approximately $350 million of expected annual management fees once deployed. This is equivalent to approximately 14% embedded growth off of our 2025 management fees.

Turning to our platforms. In credit, the $4 billion of equity capital we raised during the first quarter included about $1 billion raised in our nontraded BDCs and over $0.5 billion raised for each of GP-led secondaries, alternative credit and liquid and IG credit. During the quarter, we held the final closes for both our GP-led secondaries fund, BOSE, and our alternative credit opportunities fund, ASOF IX, around $3 billion each, with both closing above their targets, strong outcomes in the current environment. In direct lending, last 12-month gross and net originations were $39.4 billion and $8.2 billion, respectively. Repayments in the portfolio were $6.4 billion for the first quarter and over $27 billion in 2025, highlighting significant liquidity in our direct lending funds just from repayment activity alone.

As Marc mentioned earlier, the market conditions that create volatility in public markets also tend to result in spread widening and a decline in available capital across asset classes. We are beginning to see this in the origination pipeline with spreads at least 50 basis points wider. More importantly, the portfolios continue to behave in line with the discipline with which they were built. We have included some additional slides and disclosure in the supplemental information section of our earnings presentation.

Slides 24 and 25 show a series of KPIs for each of our BDCs as of December 31, which we will update through March 31 in our investor presentation.

Slide 26 compares some of these KPIs for the leveraged loan and high-yield markets.

And finally, Slide 27 compares the performance of our BDCs for the leveraged loan and high-yield markets. Now to run through some of these here, in direct lending, underlying portfolio company growth has remained healthy with no meaningful adverse movement in metrics such as our watch list, nonaccruals, amendment requests or revolver draws. Our average annual loss rate remains a very low 12 basis points, an important factor in driving our continued outperformance to leveraged loan and high-yield indices. On average, our borrowers have delivered last 12-month revenue and EBITDA growth in the mid- to high single digits.

In our tech lending portfolio, we have continued to see higher growth compared to our overall diversified lending portfolio with LTM revenue and EBITDA growth in the high single-digit to low double-digit range on average. LTVs have ticked up modestly, incorporating moves in public comps and broad-based spread widening. As a result, LTVs are on average in the low 40s across our platform and in the tech lending portfolio, continuing to illustrate meaningful equity cushion below our senior secured positions even in the face of compressed equity market multiples. And outside of direct lending, we deployed an additional $2.8 billion on a gross basis across our other credit strategies in the first quarter. And as Marc mentioned, the opportunity set is expanding across the risk-reward spectrum, and we are engaging where the risk-adjusted return is compelling.

In real assets, net lease contributed about $3 billion of the $4 billion of equity capital raised in the first quarter, roughly split between the wealth and institutional channels. In total, we have reached $5.8 billion raised for the latest vintage of our net lease flagship and continue to expect to hit our hard cap of $7.5 billion by the end of this year. For ORENT, our non-traded REIT over $200 million of the $1.1 billion raised in the first quarter came from 1031 exchange structures, and ORENT experienced its lowest percent repurchase quarter in 7 quarters. Deployment in real assets continued to accelerate, increasing more than 100% year-over-year to approximately $20 billion over the last 12 months, supported by the completion of build-to-suit projects in net lease and new commitments in digital infrastructure.

In Net Lease Fund VI, we have fully committed the fund and have reached 2/3 of capital called with visibility to be virtually fully called by this summer, in line with our prior expectations and within 3 years of its final close. Our net lease pipeline remains around all-time highs with $50 billion of transaction volume under letter of intent or contract to close. In digital infrastructure, we are also seeing a substantial pipeline of over $100 billion and have now called over 75% of the capital in Fund III, just a year after its final close at the end of April 2025. And we continue to be on track for an initial close of the next vintage of our flagship fund in the back half of this year.

In our real assets platform, we now manage $85 billion of AUM, up 27% over the last year and specifically for net lease, up 38% year-over-year. We are seeing these strategies resonate with investors looking for income-oriented returns backed by mission-critical assets and investment-grade counterparties across logistics, manufacturing, health care and data centers. In GP Strategic Capital, we raised $900 million primarily in our flagship vehicle and co-invest during the first quarter, with the total raised in our sixth vintage approaching $10 billion, inclusive of co-invest.

In March, we made an investment into Atlas, a leading investment platform with a differentiated owner-operator model within the industrial, manufacturing and distribution space, and we continue to see a robust pipeline for deployment in our latest flagship fund, which is now about 40% committed on our target.

Finally, I'd like to offer some high-level thoughts on a few items. First, we remain focused on disciplined expense management. We demonstrated FRE margin expansion in 1Q and continue to see a path to achieve our goal of 58.5% FRE margins for 2026. We declared our quarterly dividend, which we had announced on our last earnings call. We remain committed to paying out our $0.92 dividend for 2026. Our business is broader and more diversified than it was even a few years ago, and we will continue to measure ourselves by performance, portfolio behavior and the consistency of our results over time.

Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Operator, can we please open the line for questions?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Craig Siegenthaler with Bank of America.

My question is on the $6 billion of institutional fundraising in the quarter. Can you help us size the credit inflows and also what specific funds saw the inflows? And I saw your broad comments on direct lending and strategic equity, but I was hoping to get a little more detail on the fund to help us think about the fee rate dynamics and also the sustainability, too.

Sure. Thanks, Craig. You as well. Look, we continue to see flows come through up and down across our credit platform. We continue to see flows into direct lending products like ODL, SMAs. We certainly had about $1 billion come into our non-traded BDCs, OCIC, OTIC. So we saw inflows there. We continue to see, as you noted, ASOF IX, we did our final close. Alt credit continues to grow in line with what we talked about last quarter, continued very strong growth from the alt credit business. So it's really coming through up and down the board there.

We're noticing just one add-on, which I'll call more qualitative. We're noticing institutions, I think, are observing that direct lending and credit at large is actually working very, very well. And so in contrast perhaps to what is the sentiment in the air, if you will. I think institutions are actually seeing that this is an appealing time to look at credit. In fact, some who perhaps had paused credit might be very well coming back. Remember, spreads are starting to widen again. And these moments in time, as we commented on as I did a moment ago, these moments in time when markets are like this, generally speaking, have tended to actually favor opportunities in private markets. And I think institutions know that.

Your next question comes from Bill Katz of TD Cowen.

I appreciate the extra disclosure. Super helpful. Just coming back to wealth. I wonder if you could provide a little more color. You mentioned that a lot of the redemptions were driven by investors rather than financial advisers. Can you give us a sense of what you're hearing from the gatekeepers around a couple of different dynamics here?

Number one, how they're thinking about maybe the appetite for direct lending given spreads are widening out, where you're seeing the flows going if they are, in fact, leaving direct lending or they're staying in your ecosystem and just moving to other vehicles like ORENT, et cetera? And then I think you mentioned that spreads are widening out a little bit. Can you give us a little bit of an update on maybe gross and net deployment into the new quarter?

Sure. Bill, thank you for the question, and thank you for your feedback on the added disclosure. When we're on the road, we talk to folks, folks have asked for added disclosure, and we want the opportunity to show the markets what we're seeing in direct lending, as Marc just commented on a minute ago. So there's a little in your questions I want to unpack. I guess, first, in our discussions with financial advisers, generally speaking, they want the products to work as designed, 5% tenders per quarter, not more. The reason for the 5% and the reason clients want us to keep it is so that shareholders benefit from the asset class, the illiquidity premium that they're receiving. And as we pointed out, back to your comment in our earnings presentation and the supplemental information, that has worked as designed.

Our products have meaningfully outperformed the public loan markets. And with these structures, the assets are matched duration with the structure and better. So what do I mean by that? For example, paydowns in OCIC were almost $3 billion this quarter, regular way paydowns versus the gross redemptions at $1 billion this quarter. So we're 3x covered. And that's before we talk about fundraising inflows or the DRIP or liquidity at the BDC drawing on committed debt or cash on hand. So just level setting on all this because of the anxiety around private credit, and we understand that. The industry is going through another period of softer inflows and higher redemptions. But periods of softness in certain asset classes are natural. And your question is exactly that. What's also natural is that sentiment tends to move to other asset classes, which as a diversified manager like ourselves, we're well positioned to benefit from that.

So I had talked through last quarter now kind of shifting to those other capabilities. I talked last quarter in the Q&A session about some of the attributes for what it takes to be successful in the private wealth channels and how we go about expanding and continuing to grow in environments just like this. While we have large, high-quality and most importantly, well-performing products, we have a diversified suite of capabilities, as I just mentioned, which makes us really well suited to capture shifting sentiment like what we're seeing now. So the track record of our nondirect lending capabilities support exactly what I just said, right? ORENT delivered an 11% return last year and is up 2.5% in 1Q. OWLCX, our interval fund, our alternative credit product is 11% over its first year and up 2.2% in 1Q. OTIC, which is new where we just launched that at the end of last year, it's up 2.3% in 1Q. -- we have significant scale in these products.

OWLCX is the smallest at about $2.5 billion of AUM. And not leaving off, of course, our non-traded BDCs, they continue to demonstrate strong performance. OCIC has delivered a 9.1% annualized return since inception over about 5 years, which is meaningfully outperforming the leveraged loans market, high-yield bonds and traditional fixed income. So strong returns, scale and a diversified suite of products are what's needed to broaden into other channels and markets, new geographies. We've talked in the past about model portfolios, 401(k), the resources we have dedicated to private wealth globally, the new product origination capabilities and deep focus on emerging trends and opportunities. We have scaled distribution across all channels. And our business is an industry leader in a market where there's massive opportunity and significant barriers to entry. This is not easy to build.

Your next question comes from Brennan Hawken with BMO Capital Markets.

I had a couple of questions on fee rates. So the -- both in credit and real estate. So first in credit, excluding Part 1, so excluding that noise, the underlying fee rate went up 8 basis points quarter-over-quarter. I believe you had a solid fundraise in BOSE, and I think that's in that segment. So were there catch-ups in that? And maybe could you quantify that or maybe some other one-time type items or any noise? And then the real estate fee rate also looked better than expected. Was there any noise in that business as well?

Of course. Thanks, Brennan. I appreciate the question. So for credit, we did have some BOSE one-time catch-up fees. Overall, management fees were up a little. Part 1 fees were down a little. The management fees were driven by the BOSE one-time catch-up, but also things like ASOF IX, I just mentioned that the interval fund continues to grow. And so that's what I would point to for the fees in credit. And there's always some mix shift when you look at fee rates quarter versus quarter. Nothing in particular that I can think of that I would flag for real assets, though.

Your next question comes from Mike Brown of UBS.

So dry powder certainly represents an embedded growth opportunity here for you guys and certainly positive that spreads are widening. How should we think about the timing and phasing of deployment here? And as you think about -- maybe you can just give us a quick update on April, how has activity been in the month of April? And then when we think about software and tech, are those areas that you will kind of lean into are opportunities attractive there? Or is that an area that you'll kind of pull back from as you think about deployment?

Let me start with the latter, and then Alan can share a few comments on kind of how to think about deployment of that $30 billion or so of dry powder.

So let's talk about the ecosystem first, and I'll start at the highest level. Obviously, the overall M&A environment is fairly tepid right now. It's not -- it's active, and therefore, our business is active. We're seeing a nice number of opportunities to invest in. And most importantly, we like what we're seeing. and we like them at higher spreads, and we like them in an environment like this to originate. So these are the kind of environments where we are perfectly happy to be in a position with a good amount of capital to deploy selectively and certainly happy to continue, and this is, of course, the feature of the business. Loans get paid back, and they're getting paid back regularly, and Alan just talked about before, the many billions of dollars that have gotten paid back. And when those come back in, and generally speaking, those are at lower spreads and we put them back to work at higher spreads that's a really good thing for our investors.

And so that's the environment we're kind of in an aggregate, a bit of that rotation out of some of the lower spread product into higher spread products. That's a good thing. In terms of activity, it's probably a little more about geopolitics overlaying the market than it is anything else. And so it's a little -- I guess I dare say I wouldn't claim to know when that air clears and when the M&A environment picks up steam as a result. But activity is perfectly healthy. And so we're going to continue to deploy at a steady pace in lending. Now frankly, in other areas of the firm, we're seeing just tremendous acceleration in deployment. You've seen this in pipeline, triple net lease and in data center, digital infrastructure, in particular, the pipelines are just so compelling as are -- fortunately, the risk return. I think we all saw overnight, obviously, all the tech announcements, and there were a couple of consistent themes, some pretty good numbers.

But most notably, just about every single company talked about increasing their CapEx even more. Well, that just flows directly to our digital infrastructure business and our triple net lease business. So it does depend by area. In our GP stakes business, this is a good opportunity, good time for what's happening. We're seeing people return. Remember, there was a time when lots of people thought they were going to become public companies. There was a time when the M&A market was extremely active. That's not the current moment. And so that brings people back to, gee, how do I continue to finance -- the great businesses? How do I continue to fund their growth.

So I would say that we should look at the credit market right now as M&A market is fine, and we're going to be following really no particularly greater or lesser than the overall M&A market activity levels. But I expect as the air clears in the world, we'll see those accelerate again. There's certainly plenty of dry powder in the hands of private equity firms, as we all know. And we're seeing really robust pipelines, particularly real assets and accelerating in terms of engagement around GP stake. So I'd say the path ahead looks pretty appealing as we look into the back half of the year.

But Alan, any comments on pacing?

I think that was really well said. Pacing, I would think that what we saw in credit, good environment, as Marc just said, to lean in selectively on the right opportunities. Markets are functioning well. On the other side, we were paid down on over $7 billion of loans across the credit platform. So hard to tell how that will play out in any given quarter on a net basis. Real assets, we continue to see very strong deployment there. Huge pipelines. You should expect us to continue to draw down on products like Net Lease VI. I mentioned that's fully committed. We think that will be fully drawn by this summer. So pacing is going well there. And Marc commented on GP stakes, we actually have 6 really interesting investments in the pipeline, 5 of which are new investments, one is an add-on. So we're really excited about that as well.

Your next question comes from Glenn Schorr of Evercore ISI.

I want to say thank you. Slides 24 through 26 are great. Now -- so here's my question. Those -- if you looked at those statistics, you wouldn't know anything is going on in the world, meaning those are all healthy stats of some portfolios. So people are looking for the public markets crush the equities in some of these underlying companies, wider spreads and public BDCs trade a big discount. So I wonder if you could just drill down a little bit more on the color of nothing's changed on our watch list and how you quantify that.

And then most importantly, if you look at the tip of the spear, there is a software maturity wall coming in 2028 and '29. And in normal times, I think that the current lender would be part of the process of refinancing, especially in private land. So who's going to do that if the current lenders are in redemption mode? And what kind of conversations you're having? What are the equity investors' behavior? What's that like right now? So anyway, I thought that would be helpful insight to how we should all think about the go forward.

Yes. Thank you very much, Glenn. And on those additional credit stats, a couple of comments, just and then we'll jump into the specifics. Look, we're out talking to all our shareholders. That's who we work for. And what we heard is we're trying to understand, we're reading a lot of narrative to help us with the facts. We tend to try to be very data-driven in our business. And so this is additional disclosure that we hope helps people understand what we're seeing at the portfolio level as you're observing because headlines are pretty different from the underpinning facts in this context. And so we want to try to share as much as we can so people can see what we can see transparently for the good and the bad. But I think in this case, as you observe, there's a lot more to like than to dislike.

Now with that all said, as you said, let's try to look forward. We don't have a crystal ball, obviously, but I have a few things we can observe, and we'll get to the software point specifically. Let's start more generally, though. We have seen no material negative developments in our portfolios in terms of amendments, in terms of PIK in terms -- in fact, PIK has been on the decline as a percentage of the portfolio, contrary to what I think people probably would draw minds into it or suggest. No material change in watch list, no material change in nonaccruals. So those are observable and important facts. And I think, are, again, probably a little different from what people tonally would suggest would be happening. So that's a very healthy place to be, #1.

Number two, things in our business, as you know, we have a lot of visibility and things don't move fast, by which I mean, that companies as they are going from being very healthy and our average portfolio company, remember, is still growing in the high single digits, revenue and EBITDA. These are growing businesses. And to go on average from that and no material changes in those other gates, and they are gates. They're not just indicators. You don't go from I'm a healthy company to, gee, I have a tremendous problem. We have huge visibility on that. That's why we have watch list. That's why we have conversations about amendments and other topics. It's one of the great advantages of having tight documents and being in the private market. So we have visibility on people going from one stage to the next. So we can actually say with a lot of comfort that in the foreseeable future, portfolios are likely to remain very healthy.

Now when you -- the further you go out, obviously, the more variables come in, and that will bring us to the software topic. So none of us know the future state of the world transformed by AI. And obviously, the center of gravity of that conversation today is software. But frankly, it ripples across the whole economy, and all of us should probably have our eyes on that as well. But here's what we can say. We're lenders. We're not equity owners. And that's not a small distinction. We choose that position for a reason in our strategies. Our job is to be prepared, and that means doing great due diligence. It means doing good underwriting. It means doing good documentation. And importantly, it means being the senior capital where there's a lot of equity capital beneath us.

Our tech portfolio, remember, are some of the very largest companies. average EBITDA today is $320 million, and we all understand where the pressures can come from, from AI. But you're starting at $320 million with companies that in many instances have equity checks from very sophisticated sponsors of billions and billions of dollars. And we have maturities that are 3 to 4 years on average, I'll come on to your maturity wall question. But 3 to 4 years, so what that really says to all of us is today, by and large, the question on hand is really an equity question, not a debt question. A, not a monolithic answer. But if you took just one step back, you probably logically conclude that there is a set of companies that will actually be beneficiaries of AI, the agentification of the business.

There will be a set of companies in the middle of that range that will probably be harmed in terms of profitability growth, but that's far from mortal. Again, that's all equity, both those categories. And then there'll be some companies that get themselves in more substantial trouble. And that's where, again, our preparation and our work always comes to bear. This isn't new. I mean credit is not intended, never expected to be a flawless exercise. We've had defaults before. We'll have defaults in the future. And the key then becomes minimizing that number and then doing well in recoveries. And I'll tell you this, we've gone back and studied all of the cases where we've had restructurings or material amendments driven by performance issues. And here are the actual statistics in that. The actual statistics are our average principal recovery in those cases has been $0.80 on the dollar. And when you incorporate that we actually had several coupons on average in those instances as well, our actual recoveries in total on our problem situations has been 1.1 to 1.2.

Now again, not suggesting that doesn't mean you can't have worse outcomes and there couldn't be some of those in the world of software, probably a good place to watch. But you're down into a very much a subset of a subset of a subset, and our job will be to manage through that. As for -- therefore, the conversations. Listen, these have very, very large equity checks involved. And that doesn't mean that some of them won't be handed over to the lenders. Some will. But in all likelihood, and we've experienced an analogous circumstance with COVID, and again, everyone now will say, well, lasted a short time, but it wasn't -- it didn't seem that way living forward, right? It was a very dark world. And by and large, good sponsors are going to look and say, take a $10 billion buyout. Now they may very well think it's worth $10 billion, $12 billion. We may very well think it's worth $6 billion, and it has $3 billion of debt.

In either case, you're talking about someone's several billion dollars of equity check, and they're very likely to logically want to continue to sustain that. So what does sustain it mean, which brings us to your software wall question. So yes, there are a number of refinancings that are going to have to take place. And again, there will be different categories of software performance, which will be a lot clearer a few years from now than it is now and who fits in what category. And I think when we get to that place, look, it's safe to say as today, we are working down our exposure to software given the level of uncertainty. We'll all know a lot more in a few years.

But I think just to cut to the chase, you're going to end up in a circumstance where you're going to need to see a lot of equity injected by private equity firms into these companies in order to continue forward even when they have many billions of dollars of equity value they are holding on their books or understand that they have. So it's going to be working together with those. Some will I think most will work probably quite amicably. Some will probably be a little more challenging. But again, that's what we've done since the day we started. happens to be in the software arena this time. It's been in other arenas before. So don't minimize it, but I don't overstate it. I think we'll come to a point and there'll be a subset of companies that will be the more contentious ones, and then we'll work our way through. And that's what leads to having some amount of loss rate, which is endemic to not just private credit. It's going to be in public credit. It's going to be in high yield. It's going to be in equities.

And last comment, which we've all seen a lot of volatility, certainly a downward direction for sure, in software equities. But you look year-over-year and the change in the software indices is actually quite modest. And yet here, we're talking about things that are down in the 40% on average loan to value. So I think there's a lot of spring and cushion and our job is to be prepared and ready, and we are.

Your next question comes from Brian McKenna with Citizens.

First off, it's great to see the resiliency and results to start the year. Can you just remind us how much exposure you have in your direct lending funds to SpaceX? And I know this is just one investment, but I think it's important to understand how and where you invest and really how these portfolios are structured. And can you just remind us how these gains ultimately help offset future credit losses across these portfolios?

Maybe I'll take the last one first. If you go to Slide 25, you can see net gains since inception for both OTF and OTIC, whereas you would normally expect some sort of modest annualized net loss rate since inception. And so investments like that certainly contribute to what you see as an outlier, a net gain since inception on our returns.

Specifically at SpaceX, just as an example, we made about 10x our money on that investment. We've sold about half of it at a $1.25 trillion valuation, still holding about half of it. The reason I highlight that not because in the context of our funds, that's going to change the fundamental flight path. But as Alan said, those are the ways we -- even when we do have and we will have some credit losses, how we can offset some of those losses. But the other thing I would just note on that is about our ecosystem. The reason we have that position is because we were one of the very earliest lenders to SpaceX. And we made loans to the company and had the privilege of getting to know them very well and then participating in ongoing conversations about other financing opportunities and ultimately, in this case, an equity investment. And we have that elsewhere in our ecosystem.

So part of being a one-stop shop and being in a position to deliver capital solutions, it gives us a lot of ways to win on behalf of our LPs. And of course, when we win on behalf of our LPs, we win on behalf of our shareholders.

And create these very long-term partnerships with our borrowers and the sponsors.

Your next question comes from Steven Chubak with Wolfe Research.

So I wanted to ask on the FRE margin outlook. You delivered strong expansion in the first quarter, encouraging that you reaffirm the 58.5% target. Just amid the slowdown in retail fundraising, it would be helpful if you could frame some of the assumptions underpinning the FRE margin guidance and the levers that you could pull to hit the target if gross BDC flows remain subdued and redemptions stay elevated over the next couple of quarters?

Sure, of course. Happy to do that, Steven. Look, I think we've talked a little bit about this. We're very focused as a management team on showing progress on the FRE margin line. I noted in our prepared remarks, we remain very focused on disciplined expense management, and we continue to see that path to achieve the goal of 58.5% FRE margins. For '26, we certainly have comp and non-comp, right, G&A. And we have levers, I think I talked about this a little last quarter that we could pull across the board to make sure that knowing we expect to continue to be in a softer environment in wealth, you saw strong institutional results.

I think in an environment like this, you certainly saw good results out of our wealth products away from the nontraded BDCs. Even in our nontraded BDCs, you saw about $1 billion of inflows. But assuming that the environment remains soft for, let's say, the remainder of this year, the next number of quarters, we expect to continue to maintain that 58.5% FRE margin.

Your next question comes from Patrick Davitt with Autonomous Research.

In the vein of Steven's question, last quarter, you said you thought you could do low double-digit FRE growth this year. So I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how that might have shifted given the now much lower flow outlook for the retail credit products.

Yes, of course. And it's a good question. We talked about the challenging environment for the industry. We've talked about assuming this environment continues for us, there could be -- for the industry, but for us as well, there could be a wider range of outcomes for revenues. This ticks right back to keeping that in mind, we just talked about remaining focused on disciplined expense management. So when we look at something like the visible alpha consensus numbers for us, we think we can beat those numbers for 2026.

Your next question comes from Wilma Burdis with Raymond James.

You gave some good color on software earlier, but if you could give us a bit of a preview on what the software LTVs would look like today, sort of an update of those 24 to 26 slides. I know you touched on it, public comps are down a little bit. We still expect the portfolio to remain healthy, but we would think the LTVs would come up a little bit.

Yes, of course, happy to. I'll kick that one off, Wilma. So LTVs, what we've seen in the last few quarters leading up to this quarter is LTVs in the low 40s for diversified lending and low 30s for software lending. And what we saw this quarter is LTVs coming up to across the portfolio in the low 40s. So we saw a move in software LTVs. Obviously, a lot happening with public marks over the last 3 months. And so LTVs came from low 30s to low 40s, matching the diversified side, which still gives us obviously a significant amount of cushion. Marc referenced this earlier, a significant amount of cushion to the equity of about 60%.

Yes. And a couple of additional observations on that. We don't mark our own credit books. We get the marks from a third party. And so when we take those marks and apply them and then we do look at LTV based on current facts, current market environment. Alan just said this, but I actually think it's kind of important to understand that indeed, there's been obviously a deterioration in the LTV or the value of software companies. We're a lender. That's reflected. So this -- yes, we've come from low 30s to low 40s by virtue of that deterioration. I think that's an important point to understand. That's a tremendous amount of remaining cushion. Again, that's about preparation. That's about being in places with lots of underlying equity in the system.

So actually, I would dare say, I think that really speaks to the strength and durability of the underwriting and positioning that we're seeing, absolutely, we all acknowledge the challenges in software. And with those challenges understood and quantified as best they can be today, we have a lot of cushion in the system to continue to get strong returns, strong recoveries and look, we continue to see strong loan repayments.

Your next question comes from Crispin Love with Piper Sandler.

Can you discuss the fundraising outlook for 2026, maybe parse that between institutional and retail fundraising trends have remained solid, looking at the top down in recent quarters. And Alan, you did mention the first quarter seasonality, which I do appreciate. But looking at Slide 4, you did see softer private wealth year-on-year, which isn't a surprise. So how do you view the outlook differences between key investor channels and products as you plan for the rest of the year? And then just what that cadence could look like given seasonality in fundraising?

Of course, Crispin, thank you for the question. I'll take that. So we've talked about near-term softness, in particular, in the non-traded BDCs and wealth. I also mentioned earlier about having these other nondirect lending capabilities with very strong returns on a relative and absolute basis. So we're very encouraged by looking out over the horizon to see what we can continue to do with products like ORENT. It's been the #1 fundraiser in the market, the #1 returns. It's been a very strong performer, the interval fund, OTIC. But now shifting over, thinking more institutionally, but not solely institutionally, we do have more products and more strategies that cover more geographies than we ever have. So we continue to see a lot of traction and success across a number of these products and strategies.

Just to reference the 2 recently closed funds, I may have mentioned this in the prepared remarks, our GP-led secondary strategy, BOSE, we talked about that, closed at approximately $3 billion. And for a first-time fund, that's a great accomplishment. And in alt credit, ASOF IX also closed at approximately $3 billion. In both cases, we exceeded our fundraising goals. We have 3 real assets, first-time funds in the market, net lease Europe, sitting around about $1.25 billion raised to date, original goal of $1 billion to $1.5 billion. So we've already hit that goal, but we think there's a little more upside here. Products like real estate credit, data center credit, the goal has been to raise about $1 billion plus between the 2 of them in total. And we think we can exceed that goal this year.

And then when you focus on our bigger -- our large flagship funds, wrapping up net lease VI. We're sitting at about $5.8 billion today. We mentioned in our prepared remarks, we think we'll hit that hard cap of $7.5 billion by the end of this year. We're wrapping up GP stakes VI. We're at about $9 billion in the fund, $10 billion with co-invest. We're going to close out fundraising here this year. Launching BODI IV, we've talked about that as well, our next digital infrastructure fund. So setting up for our first close there in the back half of this year. And this is obviously just a subset of the products and strategies that I'm talking about.

And also, as a reminder, deploying our AUM not yet earning fees, that's $350 million of incremental annualized management fees. that we would expect over the next 12, 18, 24, probably 18, 24 months. So overall, we're continuing to see strong interest. We'll see how the rest of the year plays out. But we are cautiously optimistic with many of these products and strategies. And taking just a step back for a minute to close out, a number of these new products or strategies could be in 3 years or 4 years or 5 years, part of our series of big flagship funds for Blue Owl. So we're really focused on how do we start to generate more of these big flagships a number of years down the road, and we have a number out there that we think could absolutely fit that bill.

And just adding briefly on to that. The -- look, we have strategies that are built for all weather. They're built to be durable, predictable, generate current income and generate good downside protection and the corollary to an uncertain environment is that really serves a strong purpose in people's portfolios. And so I think we're seeing that appetite, particularly, again, visibly in the real assets arena, where we're really serving a very powerful need. And in fact, again, if we think about both for institutions and individuals alike, the idea of how do you participate in, I think it's now $700 billion of CapEx as planned by the hyperscalers. How do you do that in a fashion that is also about predictability and stability. Well, OTIC, right, our digital infrastructure product is exactly the way people can access that opportunity set to work with Microsoft and to work with Amazon. We just announced a couple of weeks ago another Amazon project, $12 billion project that we're doing.

So that's our fourth greater than $10 billion project just in the last about 18 months. And these are under long-term contract with some of the very best credits in the world. So it's really a great opportunity in time and institutions and individuals alike, I think, are both seeing that, and we've created pathways for them to participate. ORENT has been a tremendously successful product, continues to thrive. Our triple net lease business continues to turn in really strong returns. ORENT, in fact, we actually just raised the dividend on the yield on last -- I think, last quarter. So there's a lot of ways to participate across our now ever more diverse platform, and we're seeing the benefits of that, I think.

Your next question comes from Ken Worthington with JPMorgan.

What is the outlook for direct lending fee-paying AUM as we look out to the end of the year? Is it more likely to be higher, lower or flat from where we are today, given what you see as the deployment opportunities in your dialogue with investors?

It's a good question, Ken. Thank you for asking. I'll answer 2 questions. Fee-paying AUM growth, as you saw meaningful institutional dollars come through in 1Q, that typically will go into AUM not yet earning fees. And then as we deploy that capital over time, it shifts over to fee-paying AUM. And so I would expect as we continue to -- and we talk through a little bit about the successes we are seeing across our products and strategies, including credit, I would expect to continue to see fee-paying AUM grow as we continue to go through the year, in particular for credit, but across Blue Owl.

Okay. And then any comment on direct lending specifically?

I would have the same comment for direct lending. Sorry, I was more focused on direct lending. I was using the word credit. Everything I just said, I would echo for direct lending specifically.

Your next question comes from Benjamin Budish with Barclays.

Maybe another one for Alan. Just wondering if you can comment a little bit on how you're thinking about compensation, something investors tend to focus on a lot. I'm just curious if you have any thoughts you could share around the trajectory of stock-based comp, how you're thinking about cash versus equity compensation for employees and how we should think about that from a modeling perspective?

Sure. Of course. Ben, I appreciate the question. So we gave guidance on this last quarter. The numbers will move around a little bit in any given quarter, but we're in line with our guidance for the stock-based comp other line. That's $365 million was my guidance for last quarter. That's about upper teens growth. And keep in mind, when I mentioned last quarter as well, the business combination line also winds down to 0 by the end of this year.

So overall, the -- we saw an increase this quarter in stock-based comp, but our guidance continues to be in line and in line with what we're expecting for the rest of this year. On the acquisition related, you're going to see that bump around in any given quarter. And we use a combination, as we've talked about, of cash and stock for compensation at the end of the day, from an overall expense perspective, of course, we point back to the FRE margin guide of 58.5%. But specifically for stock-based comp, we're very in line with our guidance of the $365 million last quarter.

Your next question comes from Alex Blostein with Goldman Sachs.

Alan, I was hoping we could have on the balance sheet a pretty meaningful increase in the revolver sequentially. So I was hoping you can kind of walk us through the sources there. And more importantly, as you think about the dividend dynamic, obviously, not fully covered here. But as you think about the forward both on the dividend and how you guys are managing the debt level at the corporate level would be helpful.

Sure. Thanks, Alex. I appreciate the 2 questions. So let's hit both. So on the balance sheet, 1Q always steps up. And by 4Q, it comes back down. You can look back to last year, same path, the year before that, same path. We make our TRA payment. We pay bonuses in 1Q, and then you'll see that come down each quarter as we get the 4Q back to where we started the previous 4Q.

On the dividend, we're committed to paying the dividend of $0.92 for 2026. Our business is growing. You've heard a lot about that today, and we're excited about that. So we expect our payout ratio is coming down naturally. It's going to take a couple of steps as we talked about in the past, I touched on this last quarter, to bring that payout ratio back to, call it, the 85% general target that we have over the next, let's say, course of the next few years. But we are focused on the payout ratio. We're committed to the dividends. Our business is growing. So we feel good about all of those aspects.

That is all the time we have for questions. I will turn the call to Marc Lipschultz for closing remarks.

I had one last quick follow-up, which was there was a question on catch-up fees in the credit business. That was about $7 million for our BOSE products. Over to you, Marc.

Thanks, Alan. Thank you all very much for the time. We appreciate the opportunity to really have a detailed fact-driven conversation. We're always available. We're going to try to keep sharing as much as we can share and we carry forward. We're quite optimistic overall about the forward path for the business and look forward to sharing that information with you as we go forward. Thanks so much. Have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.

Joining Bank of America's 34th Annual Financial Services Conference. This is Craig Siegenthaler, North American Head of Diversified Financials at the Bank of America. And it's my pleasure to introduce Doug Ostrover. Doug is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Blue Owl as well as Chairman of the firm's board. And prior to founding Blue Owl in 2016, Doug also cofounded GSO in 2005, which he eventually sold, has become Blackstone's $0.5 trillion private credit business. So it's actually the second time that Doug has done this. So Doug, thank you so much for joining us today.

It's great to be here. Is it $0.5 trillion now?

Yes.

I should have stayed there.

You're pretty close now at $300 billion or so. So Blue Owl is an alt manager that grew from zero to $300 billion AUM in less than 10 years. Its investment performance is good to great across the board. And it's business mix is mostly in secular growth businesses, including private credit, digital infrastructure and asset-backed finance. It's also a top 2 alt manager in the private wealth channel, which is the fastest-growing channel over the last five years. So Doug, with that, let's get started on the macro front. We've entered year for the bull market IPO and M&A are expected to accelerate. The Fed is cutting rates, credit spreads are tight and maybe banks are going more in the attack now. So how does the macro backdrop play out in 2026 for the industry and also Blue Owl specifically?

Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks, everybody, for spending a few minutes today and listening to the Blue Owl's story. From a macro standpoint -- look, I view -- what we view is, we're a little bit agnostic to where rates go. Obviously, when rates go up, it's a little bit better for us, they go down, it's a little bit worse. But if I were to look across the platform, private credit, M&A plays a big role. And we're expecting a nice uplift in M&A. I think I was here last year and said the same thing. And while M&A was fine, it just didn't materialize the way we had hoped. I think M&A is looking good. If you look at the M&A stocks, which many of you -- you know many of them, they are trading well. So the only thing that makes me nervous is that when that's the consensus, it's usually wrong. But I'm cautiously optimistic. I -- we see a good M&A market, which will lead to good deployment. I think you mentioned the banks are active, but they're active in the way, they've always been active. And I'm not saying that in a negative way, but their model is to underwrite and distribute. And the market is robust, spread are tight, but what we've been able to do over a long period of time, and we're still doing it today, is delivering anywhere from 200 to 300 basis points versus what you could get in the syndicated market. Today, it's on the low end. It's been higher, but I expect deployment to be good, and hopefully, inflows will remain strong. And then across the rest of the platform, just real quickly, our alternative credit business is -- deal flow is quite strong. And I think deployment there will be good. Digital infrastructure, our backlog is the biggest it's ever been. I'm sure we'll talk about that. And then on the real asset side, I'm -- we're seeing good capital formation and lots of investment opportunities. So I'm definitely more on the optimistic side of where things are. The economy seems good. I'm sure we'll get into credit, and what we're seeing. But across the board, things look pretty good for the strategies we're in.

So taking a step back, I wanted to talk about your strategic priorities for 2026. So you've had a very active period of M&A. You added multiple products in separate growth verticals, but what are your key strategic parties now for this year? And could we see another acquisition of Blue Owl again this year?

Let me start with the last question. I -- we did make some acquisitions, which I'll touch on. I don't see us doing a strategic acquisition this year. We're not working on anything. I don't want to say it's impossible, but it's improbable at this point. In terms of what we're trying to accomplish this year, and you and I have touched briefly on this. If I look at '24, we did make a bunch of acquisitions. We felt we needed some more diversification across the platform. '25 was a period of integration and now '26 is about execution. So execution, first and foremost, is we've heard from the stream, from our investors. We've got to improve margins, you're going to see margins continue to improve. Not, they're not going to jump from where, I can't remember exactly where we ended the year, 58%, 58% and a little to 60%, but you're going to see gradually quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year, margins going up. We're focused on FRE per share. We said -- I think Alan said for '26, growth will be modestly better than '25. And then we hope to see a real acceleration in '27. So that, obviously, we're very focused on. We had record fundraising last year, both in the wealth channel and on the institutional side. I think wealth could be a little bit more muted for the first 6 months, and then we hope to see it accelerate again in the second half of the year. And we're still very bullish on what we're going to do institutionally. In terms of away from financials, fundraising is key for us. We've got to finish up our GP stakes fund. We're going to finish up our real estate flagship fund. I think we ended the year at $4.5 billion. We have on the cover $7.5 billion. We want to hit that, maybe do a little bit better. We finished up our fundraise for asset-backed and will be in the market in the second half of the year with hopefully a big number on the cover for digital infrastructure. We also were able to take some of those acquisitions and very quickly get them in the wealth channel. Basically within a year of buying them, digital infrastructure, we raised just under $2 billion in the asset-backed side. We raised the largest interval fund or initial interval fund, and we're getting really good traction there. So I think -- as I think about strategic initiatives, it's really -- we've integrated things and now it's taking each of those businesses and really getting out there and execute with a real focus on margin and growing FRE.

So Doug, I wanted to talk about deployment. You hit on this briefly earlier, but when you're in a 3-, 4-year bull market, credit spreads tend to be pretty thin at that moment. At the same time, though, we are expecting a big pickup in M&A, which will provide new origination opportunities. But as you sit here today, what is the deployment outlook look like?

Well, what deployment for us is really closely tied in credit, it's very closely tied to the M&A cycle. And if there's M&A, I can tell you, not all firms, but mostly firms really like the idea of financing their buyouts day 1 with private debt. They like knowing who their creditors are. So the question I get all the time is why are people daring deals with you? You're more expensive than the public market. Your covenants are tighter. These are savvy people on the other side, why did they do it? And really -- just going to take a step back and think about what the true cost is, it's really de minimis. You're buying a new business. It's an auction. It's like buying a house in a hot housing market. You get somebody to do the inspection, you buy the house, you get in there and then you start opening walls, and you realize, it's quite -- it's really not as good as you thought. I would tell you in companies today, there's a lot of cash on the sidelines. When good assets come up for sale, it's a bit of a frenzy. And so by working with us, if God forbid, there is an issue, you know who your creditors are. You know if you need to go back, reach a quick deal, it might just be us, it might be us and a few others, but it's very manageable. So it's a very inexpensive insurance policy. Now why do I say it's inexpensive? And this is the negative to direct lending. We don't have a lot of call protection. Maybe we get 18 months or 2 years. So think about it if you're a PE firm. You go buy the business, you figure out what you want to do with it. When things look good, 18 months, usually, it's a 101 call, maybe 102. You've paid a little bit higher coupon. And then if you want, you can go to the syndicated market. So I bring this up because if we see like everybody is expecting an increase in M&A, you will see elevated deployment for us.

So let's flip it and talk about digital infrastructure. So you bought a business in this space, kind of at the perfect moment, right before this AI boom. So would it like that IPI? Why did -- and also why did they choose to partner with Blue Owl?

Well, you know I'm incredibly bullish on this space. And it had been something I was really focused on. So let me start with your question why they chose us. IPI had two owners. One of the owners wanted to sell. The remaining owner had the ability to direct where it went. And you can imagine the usual cast of characters, all my competitors wanted to buy it. But this one firm who controlled it, a firm called Iconic, said that we don't want to go to auction. We just want to work with Blue Owl. So we were able to buy it at a very attractive price. So why was I so excited? Truth be told, I have been chasing after IPI for years. And the reason I got to it was we are the market leader in triple net lease. Now until we got involved in it, triple net lease was really just a niche strategy. Now we have tens of billions of assets in it. And for those who don't follow it, simply, it's we go to an investment-grade company. We buy assets from them that we think are mission-critical, and they lease it back. It's triple net, insurance, taxes, maintenance is all borne by the tenant. So we just get a cash flow stream. And as I mentioned, market leader, we've generated in excess of 20% returns per annum in that business. Our clients, our tenants, for the most part, are BBB companies. Many are weak BBBs. So at one point, I think we own 10% of Walgreens stores. We've done deals with Cracker Barrel. We recently did a deal with, well, I don't know if I'm supposed to say, but a bunch of distribution and cold storage facilities for food distribution business. We're earning on average in those deals, about a 7.5% cap rate with a 3% escalator per annum over, let's say, 20 years. BBB 7.5%, 3% escalator. And then I started understanding what's going on in data centers, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, that you could get the same 7.5% cap rate, same triple net lease structure, same 3% escalator, but instead of financing a lot of BBB companies who are great businesses, now we're providing capital to some of the largest companies in the world, on average, AA rated. And so I knew it couldn't last. But I thought -- I think we can -- the projects are big. We can deploy a lot of capital. So we are getting from this type of tenant, oftentimes, we're starting out with an 8% cap rate. And it goes up by 25 basis points a year. 8 years from now, you could have a Google, Microsoft type piece of paper at a 10 coupon. Google did a deal yesterday a 40-year deal at 90 over. They're going to print today a 100-year deal. And yet I think I can get very comparable credit risk and maybe make a 20, maybe more. And just to give you -- just quickly, when I talk to people about this, they're like, "Oh, but the residual value of a data center, 20 years from now, it may not be worth anything." Well, I can show you if I started at 8, and I use leverage, if the data center 20 years from now is worth zero, thousands of acres of land, dozens of buildings, lots of equipment, it will not be worth zero, but if it's worth zero, as long as Meta, Microsoft, Google pay me, I make a 10 to 12. If I get back $0.30 on the dollar, I compounded almost a 17% return. So the bet I have to make is, will those firms be able to honor a lease over 20 years. The bond market would tell you it's 40 years, 90 over, it's a very low probability they're not going to pay us. And so I look at that, and it's one of the best risk-adjusted returns I've ever seen in my life. I'll stop talking about it now, but one final thing, when you have demand here and supply here, and they don't want to finance on balance sheet, they've made the decision to use other people's money to buy real estate and build buildings. And as long as that demand supply stays out of balance, we'll continue to generate these returns. But I think we all know, even in the high-yield market or in any market, that arbitrage will disappear over time. It will especially disappear when your average tenant is a AA credit. So I can't tell you right now, you probably saw this. Everybody came out and doubled their CapEx budget. It's now $650 billion. And for all of you, obviously, you're looking at the economy, I mean, we're working on projects right now. Our biggest deal is just under $30 billion for Meta. We're working on deals. I am not exaggerating. This is just for the shell and maybe some GPUs in there, $50 billion. I mean, in our lifetime, I never thought I'd be financing deals of that size, but I never thought I'd come across CapEx projects of that magnitude. So it's an exciting opportunity. I think it's going to go on longer than I originally thought, and we're really going to try to take advantage of that arbitrage.

So Doug, on that, I think one misconception is that you have a lot of private credit exposure to data centers, but it's actually coming out of the IPI -- former IPI business, your data center business through release. But what is your private credit exposure to data centers?

Well, today, we don't do anything in private credit to data centers. We -- in terms of lending, we have nothing. And there's a misconception. So remember, we're doing 20-year leases. So if I'm going to do a 20-year lease, I've got to make sure that I'm working with companies that can pay us back. And so let's just take a company like anthropic. It's an amazing business. They're going to go raise money at $400 billion. They're going to go public at a much bigger value. But would I sign a 20-year lease with anthropic today, and I know Dario Amodei, I spend -- I just traveled with him. I'm -- amazing company, but I couldn't sign a 20-year lease. It just doesn't make any money yet. Same thing with Open AI. I -- so -- one, there's the misconception that we're working with companies that are not the best companies in the world. In terms of lending, when the Meta deal, there was a $25 billion bond deal, amortizing. We took a piece really in our insurance business because it was rated single A or AA. And then PIMCO investment grade, we sold the rest to them. So in the credit side now, it's not an area we're lending into right now. We might look at it out of the real asset side, a dedicated fund, but it would be primarily IG paper.

So given your focus on the picks and shovels around AI and AI, what are your thoughts on if we are entering an AI bubble here, especially around public market securities. And does it really matter that you got because you have these bulletproof 15-year plus leases to an investment-grade company that is fairly safe.

Yes. Listen, I'm really not in a position to tell you whether we're in an AI bubble or not. But we do work with the biggest companies, the most sophisticated people when it comes to AI. And they think it's the equivalent of the industrial revolution, and it's going to be life changing. I will tell you that most of the people we talk to who touch at the closest, think that Wall Street in general and investors have a tendency to overestimate its impact in the short term and underestimate its impact longer term. So I -- as I said earlier, CapEx is going to continue to grow. They think it's so big, it's the equivalent of having like an incredible product, but not having manufacturing. We're those manufacturing facilities. We create the compute. But to answer the question you asked, we're not making an AI bet. What we are doing is making a bet that those firms over a 20-year lease, let's say, 15 to 20 years, are going to be able to honor their obligations. And I think just based on where comparable debt securities trade, the marketplace would tell you that is a very, very low risk of default. I don't know the exact probability, but I have to guess it's under 1% or 2%. And so if I can make a mid-teens base case with the potential to make in the 20s on taking the risk that those companies will continue to pay us, I think that's really compelling, and that's why you and I have talked about, I think it's one of the best risk-adjusted returns, we'll see in our lifetime.

So let's now change it up to ABF, asset-backed finance. So Blue Owl acquired Atalaya, I think I pronounced it right, in 2024, which added a best-in-class ABF capability. And how is this transaction tracked today, and what do you see as the long-term growth drivers of ABF? And kind of how do you think about that TAM longer term?

Well, I'm just a -- just to give you a little history of it, if I went back to when Silicon Valley Bank and a few other regional banks went under, about 6 months later we started getting calls from the teams -- asset-backed teams at banks that their lines of credit were being cut. And so the ability to generate historical profits had gone down. And they were looking for a home. And so we started doing a lot of work on it. And originally, we were going to build it organically. We touched a lot of the markets they were in and put together a game plan to do that, hire a few people, and then we get approached by Atalaya. Again, no auction, wasn't shopped, just senior people at our firm knew the senior team there. As you mentioned, Atalaya almost a 20-year track record best-in-class, but they woke up to the reality that their world is getting more competitive. Firms like Apollo, who are now generating -- competing not just on the below investment grade space, but in the IG space. And they realized that they needed a better distribution, access to capital, and so we very quickly cut a deal. It's off to a very good start. The TAM in that space, depending on who you're talking to on the low end, is, let's call it, $8 trillion to $10 trillion and high-end many multiples of that. The penetration unlike direct lending is negligible. And so it reminds me of where direct lending was maybe 15, 20 years ago. But the difference is, I was in the leverage finance department at DLJ and Credit Suisse. It was very natural for us to say, "Oh, we understand credit. Let's go build this." But in the ABF space, if you go buy, you have to buy 20,000 loans from SoFi. You've got to have the systems to understand it, to track it. If someone doesn't pay, how do you collect? What you do? And so -- and they have this history and the performance has been exceptional. They joined a little over a year ago. We got it fully integrated. As I mentioned, we launched a wealth product. We finished the institutional product. I believe they were a little over $10 billion and raised $4 billion of capital for them last year. And we're in the market without interval fund. And I think it's a nice complement to what we do in direct lending. As I said, less competition, returns are more compelling. Just to give you an idea, our institutional fund, I think last year, generated a 19% gross return. So I'm really excited about it. I am -- yes, we'll see overtime, but I hope to make that into significant leg to the stool.

Great. So let's jump into your private credit business, where Blue Owl is a leader, your first business essentially. How would you sum credit quality trends to date?

So I'm glad you brought this up because certainly I've gotten this call from a lot of people because there's been so many negative articles about what's going on in credit. And so just to give you an idea, at Blue Owl, our average company probably does $320 million of EBITDA. So we lend to big companies. Our average loan to value on the typical industrial is right around 40%. And on a software company, it's right around 30%. As you -- I think you mentioned this earlier, our performance has been really strong over the 10-year period we've been operating. We've had 8 basis points of annualized losses. So not quite zero, but de minimis loss. I talk to a lot of CIOs, and it's very important for me to manage their expectations about what the returns are going to look like for the next year. It's the last thing I want them to do is be blindsided, especially with so much negative sentiment. The truth is, and I'm sure you've heard this from others, and you'll hear from them today, the portfolios are all doing really well. The industrial side, we're having right around 10% EBITDA growth in the fourth quarter versus year ago. Software is in excess of, well, let's call it, 15%. Our non-accruals are not going up. Will we have some bankruptcies here and there? We definitively will. I mean it's just part of the business. Some I think we'll get back par. Some will get a discount. But net-net, over a 10-year period, very small losses, and I can tell you with a very high degree of certainty, over the next 18 to 24 months that these portfolios will continue to perform exceptionally well. Now will returns come down a little bit? Definitely. SOFR is down down. Spreads are a little tighter, but in terms of bankruptcies, it's going to be de minimis. We expect recoveries to stay pretty consistent. And how do I know this? Well the press loves to talk about two companies I've never heard about until they wrote about it, First Brands and Tricolor, they're still writing about it. It's been like 7 months, but those were companies where there was fraud. So you had -- and by the way, they weren't private debt issuers. So I never seen it, but these were companies that traded at par and the next day, they dropped precipitously. As most of you know, in corporate credit, that's not how it works. We start to see some weakness. Company misses budget, maybe it's starting to bump up against covenants. Do we have to work with the PE firm. We have to put it on a watch list, eventually doesn't have to go to nonaccrual. So it's a long process. We're just not seeing that today. The names where we have problem have been our problem names for a long time. A number of them have been problems since COVID, just never recovered, relied on China, things never thought out there, just a variety of issues. But net-net, the funds, I believe, the next 18 to 24 months are going to put up really good numbers. And by the way, without naming the firms, I've gone down, and I've gone out and met with the CEOs of my biggest competitors just to see are they having a similar experience. And very candid conversation, and they're saying the exact same thing. So I think we're going to remain despite all the negative rhetoric in the press in a very benign environment.

How much time do we have left. I don't want to steal your time. Oh good, there we go. Okay. So real quickly. The one thing I do want to point out that I just find really curious, when I was doing a one-on-one or little group meeting ahead of this. So we're senior secured lenders. And on average, we're about, let's call it, 40% loans and value. That's 60% private equity underneath us. On my $0.40 that I'm putting in, or 40%, if I lose $1, I promise you, the PE firm is getting zero. And so if you're worried about direct lending at all, you've got to be really worried about PE. There are trillions and trillions of dollars at work, and yet nobody seems to be writing about it. Then if you go up the cap stack, just a tiny bit, there's a multitrillion dollar high-yield market. It's unsecured, has no covenants. They won't get zeros, but they'll get between $0.05 and $0.20 recoveries. So if you're worried about us at the top, those two are really vulnerable. The other thing that just people don't understand, and I'm not trying to debate bank CEOs, but I underwrote loans for a long, long time in a bank. And let's say, I'm working with a big PE firm, I don't know, KKR, and I'm a bank. My goal is to get that bank the lowest price possible on their debt and the weakest convenance because that's how I get the next deal. And so a deal gets announced on a Monday, and it's printing on Friday. You get to do maybe 72 hours of work. In the direct lending space, we're working on these deals for months. We're negotiating every word in that indenture. I can tell you public side, you need to get money to work. You don't even have time to read the indenture. Now I'm not saying it's a bad market. I'm just saying that really peel the onion back. This is a safer way, you get higher returns to play, you give up liquidity, but is definitively a safer way than the syndicated market. But my point is this, there are trillions and trillions, it probably aggregates the $8 trillion that I think is vulnerable if you're worried about direct lending, yet you hear about cockroaches and shadow banking, but the rest of that cap stack, nobody really takes about. So I -- going back to where I started before I went on my tirade here, I think it's going to be good performance for the next couple of years.

Great. So I mean, to date and even last year, your private credit funds did have good performance, yet we did see a pickup or redemption in the fourth quarter. Maybe comment what drove that? Was part of that seasonal? And I'm thinking the diversified U.S. fund, not OTIC. And then since performance is good, but flows got a little worse, when do you think flows get better?

So look, here's the problem of the structure in wealth. There's no penalty for leaving. So it's just human nature. If you're an adviser, and there are some advisers in the room, and you start seeing all these stories, and your clients called, and they're concerned, there's no cost to saying, "Hey, you know what, let's go out of the market, we'll go to cash for 30 days." To your point, we'll get to the end of the year. We'll see where things are in January, February. And so we weren't surprised by it, and I think you should assume just with all the volatility in the markets across the board, we'll see elevated redemptions again in the first quarter. But the returns have been good, and that's what matters the most. That's what attracts people to the asset class. Why they want to be in? So look, if I were to model it, I would assume first, maybe second quarter is a little bit weak and then we start to see it come back at historical levels. That's how we're thinking about it.

Got it. So at the early 2025 Investor Day, you provided us FRE growth guidance of 20% per year. Now a lot of us focus on FRE after tax per share. So I'm wondering because there's different moving pieces there, how do you think of that metric? Is that metric probably drives what you plan to grow the dividend at in the future?

I want to -- I'm not sure I fully understand the question, but let me give you my best guess. I am -- I think the way Alan addressed this on the earnings call. Given what we're expecting for wealth in the first and second quarter, I think we're expecting FRE per share to -- from a growth rate to be modestly higher, modestly higher growth than what we saw in '25. And then as things normalize, we're expecting things to accelerate. I think Alan also mentioned, probably about 2% issuance in shares. And we've got some questions on tax. I don't want to give the wrong number, but tax rate just being -- just a few percentage points higher.

Got it. Maybe let's just -- you know what, actually, let's take a moment because we're running out of time and just see if there's any questions from the audience. So please raise your hand, we will get you a microphone if there's a question. I got one more up here. All right, so let me ask the private wealth question. You're #2 in the world at this, and you did this very early too. What inning do you think we are in, in the migration to -- for alts in the private wealth channel, and private credit has been the best spot for the last few years. Do you think we're undergoing a transition to private equity, which did outperform private credit last year or even infrastructure, which is less sensitive to Fed funds?

Well, in terms of where we are in innings, hard to say but early, second or third inning. And when we launched the wealth business 10 years ago, I had left Blackstone, and I was trying to figure out, okay, we're a new firm. What can we do better than the big firms. And if you remember, 10 years ago; one, nobody was focused on wealth; and two, when they were focused, they had what was known as an adviser, sub-adviser relations, where all these big alternative managers didn't want to distribute it, so they were the sub-adviser. And there were firms like Franklin Square and SION and CNL and none of those relationships really worked. And I thought day 1 by bringing it in-house, I could give investors a better experience. And by better experience, what I said was in all of our institutional funds, all of our wealth funds, we're going to invest in the same product. We're going to give the wealth investor the identical experience as the institutional investor. And that really allowed us to scale, and we've delivered. We've delivered good results. And so everybody is always asking, "Hey, why are you able to get your products, you're not as big as these other firms into these platforms." We built a very large team. We've shown we can raise a lot of money and most importantly, we've executed in terms of performance. In terms of where the market is going, I think at the end of the day, I think PE is having its moment in the sun and raising good amount of money. But I think strategies that offer low volatility and high current income are going to be the things that resonate the most. That's why private credit has done so well. I'm not sure many of you are aware of this, but we were the #1 fundraiser last year in real estate. And we generated, Alan's here, I want to say an 11% net return for investors, tax-advantaged. And while I really like credit, and I think it will continue to grow for many investors, it's a little bit tax inefficient. So finding something that can generate a double-digit return that's tax efficient, that's really exciting for wealth. And I think, as I think about the products that are going to resonate, tax will play a role and high current income will be the other piece.

Great. With that, we are out of time. So Doug, on behalf of all of us at Bank of America, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it.

Good morning, and welcome to Blue Owl Capital's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I'd like to advise all participants that this conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Anne Dai, Head of Investor Relations for Blue Owl.

Thanks, operator, and good morning to everyone. Joining me today are Mark Lipschultz, our Co-Chief Executive Officer; and Alan Kirshenbaum, our Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind our listeners that remarks made during the call may contain forward-looking statements which are not a guarantee of future performance or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that are outside the company's control.

Actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those described from time to time in Blue Owl Capital's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. We'd also like to remind everyone that we'll refer to non-GAAP measures on the call, which are reconciled to GAAP figures in our earnings presentation available on the Shareholders section of our website at blueowl.com.

Please note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any Blue Owl fund. This morning, we issued our financial results for the fourth quarter of 2025, reporting fee-related earnings, or FRE of $0.27 per share and distributable earnings or DE of $0.24 per share. For the full year 2025, we reported FRE of $0.96 per share and DE of $0.84 per share.

We declared a dividend of $0.225 per share for the fourth quarter payable on March 2 to holders of record as of February 20, and we also announced an annual fixed dividend of $0.92 for 2026, or $0.23 per quarter, starting with our first quarter 2026 earnings. During the call today, we'll be referring to the earnings presentation, which we posted to our website this morning.

So please have that on hand to follow along. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Mark.

Great. Thank you so much, Ann. Blue Owl experienced significant growth in 2025, measured by record fundraising across an increasingly diversified set of strategies globally. We raised $56 billion of capital across the business, including over $17 billion during the fourth quarter, with record years for both our institutional and private wealth channels. .

During the fourth quarter, we crossed $300 billion of AUM, another milestone for the firm, and we are seeing robust investor demand and investment pipelines across the business as we enter 2026. Our ability to drive strong results for shareholders starts with investment performance, and we continue to deliver for our clients. Investment performance matters greatly to us as it relates to long-term growth for Blue Owl and if we deliver great results, business growth will follow.

Performance of the funds we manage remain strong, supported by our focus on generating attractive returns to income, leveraging our scale to create opportunities that offer attractive return per unit of risk and protecting the downside through investment structure and rigorous underwriting. Our net lease strategy generated gross returns of over 13% in 2025. And our ORENT product net return was approximately 11%, meaningfully outperforming the FTSE REIT index total return of 2.3% due to our differentiated investment strategy and fundraising for ORENT has accelerated, with inflows up 11% quarter-over-quarter and 55% year-over-year, making ORENT the top net fundraiser in nontraded REITs in 2025.

On a fully realized basis, our net lease flagship funds have generated a net IRR of 24% since inception. During the fourth quarter, we sold the final assets of our Digital Infrastructure Fund I for a realized net IRR of approximately 11.5%. Direct lending net returns were 8.7% for the year compared to the leverage loan index return of 5.9%, and our continuously offered BDCs had continued strong performance with net returns of 7.4% for OCIC and 8.4% for OTIC. And our GP Stakes funds continued to generate very strong IRRs with a significant amount driven by cash yield.

In credit, the fourth quarter was marked by a high level of debate and discussion about the health of the private credit markets. The fact of the matter is the trends we observed within Blue Owl's credit portfolios remain strong and did not align with the headlines or investor fears. The sentiment seems to be echoed broadly by other asset managers and banks alike across broader credit markets.

As of the fourth quarter, we continue to see resilient KPIs across our direct lending strategy, with healthy underlying portfolio company growth and no meaningful movement in our metrics such as [indiscernible], LTVs, amendment requests or revolver draws. On average, our borrowers have delivered high single-digit revenue growth and low teens EBITDA growth year-over-year. Specifically, our tech lending portfolio, this growth has been even higher in the low to mid-teens range on average.

Notably, since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, which is widely regarded as a turning point in AI, borrowers in our tech portfolio have achieved cumulative weighted average revenue growth of nearly 40% and and cumulative weighted average EBITDA growth of nearly 50% through September. Our average annualized net realized loss rate has been 8 basis points, encompassing realized losses and gains. This remains well below industry average.

Remember, this is not a zero loss strategy. We have hundreds of borrowers, and we will have losses in the portfolio. No one can loan money without having losses. The expectation of our investors is that we will rigorously underwrite our deals to minimize defaults and maximize recoveries over time, which will drive attractive total returns as we have done very well. In alternative credit, our portfolio similarly continued performance expected, putting up gross returns of 16.6% for the year with no meaningful signs of stress.

From a fundraising perspective, industry-wide nontraded BDCs experienced a slowdown in capital raising and elevated redemptions during the fourth quarter. This is in line with what we have seen in prior market environments with heightened volatility and fear. We saw this during COVID with the Silicon Valley Bank failure and after tariffs were announced last year. We've always managed our funds with a sharp focus on leverage and liquidity. And during the fourth quarter, we met all investor requests for tenders as we have every quarter since inception.

Our view is the most sentiment for a particular product strategy or asset class will fluctuate strong risk-adjusted performance is the only thing that matters over the intermediate and long term. And our products have performed very well in this regard across a wide range of economic and market environments. Despite the headwinds, we had a record quarter for equity raised in private wealth, with about $5 billion raised during the fourth quarter and over $17 billion for the full year, we are now beginning to see the synergies of the acquisitions we made over the past 18 months.

During the fourth quarter, we held a $1.7 billion first close on our digital infrastructure evergreen product, [ ODIT ], which followed an $850 million close earlier in the year on our alternative credit interval fund, OWLCX, which has already reached $1.8 billion of AUM in just 3 orders. In 2025, equity capital raised across our 5 well dedicated Evergreen products totaled $15.4 billion for the year, which represents 66% of the beginning of the period fee-paying AUM in these products despite substantial market shocks earlier in the year and near-term headwinds in the nontraded BDCs.

All this is to say, we have expanded and diversified our private wealth footprint substantially, and we continue to feel that we are just scratching the service of this market. Moving to our institutional business, we likewise benefited from ongoing diversification and the investments we have made in mobile distribution. We saw record institutional equity fund raise of $25 billion in 2025, up 80% year-over-year and constituting about 60% of total equity raised in 2025.

This includes about $5 billion raised for direct lending across funds and SMAs and over $6.5 billion raised for our net lease strategy across our global European and co-invest vehicles. Since 2020, the average time to market for our real estate fund has nearly doubled to more than 2 years, with roughly half of those funds also fall in sort of their fundraising targets, highlighting the broader challenges in this asset class. Blue Owl's net lease strategy bucked these trends with our prior flagship fund net lease Fund VI, holding a final close of the fourth quarter of 2024, above its hard cap having been in market for just 16 months.

The momentum has continued into our current vintage, which remains in market and has raised 60% of its hard cap in just 3 quarters. And now we have very complementary capabilities in digital infrastructure, which is similarly focused on generating attractive income-driven returns through a net lease structure, working with tenants that have some of the best credit ratings in the world. We think we have a very unique offering for investors in digital infrastructure, a pure play that will benefit from the demand for hyperscalers for data centers while remaining focused on principal preservation.

And finally, to call out some of the contributors to our fundraising that have been less observable, we have now reached our $2.5 billion target for the latest vintage of our opportunistic alternative credit product with $1 billion of that raised in 2025. In total, we raised nearly $4 billion across alternative credit in 2025 after having closed on the acquisition in September 2024. Our GP-led continuation strategy is approaching the final close of its first vintage, for which it will have raised approximately $2.5 billion.

We think this is an excellent result for our first time raise in a new strategy, has exceeded our recent expectations on fundraising, and we've deployed a meaningful amount of the capital already. And in GP Stakes, as we previously disclosed, the strip sales we completed in 2025 drove $2.6 billion of capital raised on top of fundraising for our minority stakes fund.

Looking at the big picture on fundraising, we took substantial steps forward by strengthening our global distribution platform, launching new products and expanding or launching new partnerships throughout the course of 2025. And during the year, we knew this would be an investment and execution year, laying the tracks for future earnings growth. You can see the early successes of that long-term plan and the results that we reported this morning.

Despite the significant investments we've made, we were able to end the year with FRE margins slightly above our guidance for 2025 and heading into 2026, we believe we can achieve modest operating leverage and continue to make progress on FRE per share growth. Bringing you to back to where I started, we continue to deliver for our clients. We strongly believe that high-quality performance drives business growth over time and that the continued diversification of the business will support well-balanced growth. We're very proud of the work that we've done over the past 2 years to position Blue Owl for long-term success across a variety of market environments, and we look forward to sharing more updates in the quarters to come.

With that, let me turn it to Alan to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Marc, and good morning, everyone. We are very pleased with the results we reported this quarter and for the full year. We had another very strong quarter of fundraising in 4Q, raising $12 billion of equity. You can see the breakdowns on Slide 14 of our earnings presentation. .

As you can see from our results, we ended the year with FRE margins of 58.3%, slightly above our guidance for 2025 and showing disciplined expense management, and we believe we can see modest margin expansion for 2026, targeting approximately 58.5% FRE margin. We also ended 2025 with FRE per share growth of 12%. As we focus on 2026, we believe we can show a modest increase in the growth rate for FRE per share, and we feel we can accelerate that growth in 2027 versus 2026.

Now a quick run-through of some other metrics for 2025. We grew FRE 19% and DE 16%. Total capital raised was $56 billion, which represents an increase of 18% year-over-year and equity fundraising was $42 billion, which represents an increase of more than 50% year-over-year.

AUM not yet paying fees grew to $28.4 billion representing over $325 million of expected annual management fees once deployed. This is equivalent to approximately 13% embedded growth off of 2025 management fees. And as Marc walked through in his remarks, the performance across our strategies continues to be very strong.

As you can see throughout our earnings presentation, including on Slides 4 and 22, we continue to deliver for our clients. Our products performed very well again in 2025. Turning to our platforms. In credit, weighted average LTVs remains in the high 30s across direct lending and in the low 30s specifically in our tech lending portfolios. On average, underlying revenue and EBITDA growth across our portfolios was in the high single digits.

As Marc mentioned earlier, credit quality remains very strong. In direct lending, growth in net origination in the fourth quarter were $12 billion and $3.3 billion, bringing last 12 months gross to net originations to $45.4 billion and $13.2 billion, respectively. Despite strong public loan market conditions, we continue to see a growing pipeline of discussions.

And importantly, we are seeing the benefits of incumbency as approximately 60% of our gross originations in 2025 resulted from existing borrower relationships. We also continue to see very large deals being done in the direct lending market with an average deal size of nearly $2 billion for Blue Owl in 2025, up 23% from the prior year and we continue to lead or co-lead many of them.

Turning to alternative credit. We have continued to deploy meaningfully across investment grade and noninvestment grade. In this strategy, we have been able to take advantage of market dislocations, given the flexibility with which we approach various asset classes. We can buy assets, finance assets or engage in structured capital transactions depending on where we see relative risk/reward.

In real assets, we remain focused on our core competency, owning mission-critical assets from investment-grade counterparties, whether those are logistics facilities, manufacturing plants, or data centers leased to some of the largest companies in the world with exceptional credit ratings. We have [ called ] close to 2/3 of the capital for net lease Fund VI and believe that we will have nearly fully deployed the fund within the next couple of quarters within 3 years of its final close.

We have also started committing capital out of the current vintage of net lease with a meaningful pipeline of over $60 billion of transaction volume under letter of intent or contract to close. In digital infrastructure, we are similarly seeing a substantial pipeline and have called over 50% of the capital in Fund III, which just held its final close in April of 2025.

In GP Strategic Capital, performance across the funds remain strong. We have begun to see increasing levels of activity in partner manager funds across both deployment and monetization, including what we believe to be the largest transaction ever announced by a sponsor. The consolidation trend remains in place, with the percentage of capital raised by funds raising more than $5 billion continuing to increase over the past 5 years. This has been a central part of our investment thesis in our large cap strategy and our fund investors have been beneficiaries, with the AUM of our partner managers growing more than 30% faster than the broader market over the past 10 years.

Okay. A couple of notes I wanted to highlight before we wrap up. on our effective tax rate, we expect 2026 to be in the mid- to high single-digit percentage range, in line with our general expectation that our effective tax rate increases a few percent each year. As a reminder, we pay our tax receivable agreement during the first quarter each year, so expect a higher effective tax rate for the first quarter of 2026 and a much lower for the second through fourth quarters.

For reference, we disclosed an estimate of the next few years TRA payments in our quarterly SEC filings. On stock buybacks, the company buyback and senior executive purchases totaled approximately $70 million in the fourth quarter of 2025. When we see our stock deeply discounted, we intend to utilize our existing stock repurchase program. As it relates to share count, we currently expect 2% growth in 2026, with roughly 14 million shares to be issued related to the acquisition of our digital infrastructure strategy and the remainder being driven by normal course stock compensation.

As for stock compensation, we have 3 types of items running through our stock comp expense numbers, all on Slide 28 of the earnings presentation. The line to focus on our regular way year-end stock compensation expense is equity-based compensation, other, which we expect will be running at approximately $365 million for 2026.

As a reminder, the amortization of stock-based compensation from business combination grants will tail off by the end of 2026. And the line called acquisition-related is GAAP amortization expense related to some of the acquisitions we've made over the last few years. Finally, I'd like to pull the lens back for a moment. There's been a lot of noise about our sector over the past several months.

Across our portfolios, we have a very diversified set of investments that generate high income for our investors with downside protection. We have high FRE margins that we expect will continue to expand and are laser-focused on increasing the growth rate of our FRE per share each year. We have invested for expansion and diversification across the business with the results showing continued strong fundraising across our products and importantly, strong performance returns. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Operator, can we please open the line for questions?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Craig Siegenthaler with Bank of America.

And despite the stock reaction, it's nice to see the strong fundraising and 62% FRE margin result in the quarter. My question is on software AI disruption, which has really emerged as a big theme recently. Can you help us size up your exposure across both debt and equity. And then as you take a step back and look across your hundreds of private investments, like what are you seeing in the pipeline in terms of credit quality? Because if you look at returns, revenue, EBITDA growth, interest coverage, general credit quality, like it doesn't look like there's any red flags yet. So are there any sections of the software book that concerns you?

Yes. Thank you very much. So let's level set and come to those specific answers. So a couple of observations to start with. Tech lending has worked, continues to work. And to get very direct right to your answer, no, we don't have red flags and point of fact, we don't have yellow flags. We actually have largely green flags. The tech portfolio continues to be the most pristine amongst all of our portfolios, amongst all of our subsectors.

I appreciate we're all looking forward. But remember, these are loans that are on average 30% of the value of the enterprise at time of acquisition or LTV with huge equity cushions. These are companies on average. Let's -- again, let's be fact-based, headline driven since -- let's use November '22, the advent of ChatGPT is some kind of moment of AI's arrival.

Since that time, the portfolio on average has grown revenue 40% and EBITDA 50%, [indiscernible] bring it much more current because we can all agree that November was doing [indiscernible], so maybe it didn't matter. But let's bring it to this quarter, the fourth quarter, the revenue growth was 10%, and the EBITDA growth in those software names was mid-teens. That's fourth quarter quarter-over-quarter.

The -- it is not a monolith, and it's, listen, this is the opportunity because, obviously, when this happens, of course, markets can deeply disrupted, that hopefully leads to spot opportunity. It certainly leads to dispersion in performance and we will outperform. If you look at all of our products, and we led with this in my early beginning of my comments here, we're there for a reason. The end of the day, stories don't drive results, results drive results.

As you can see, we have delivered on every one of our products that absolutely top-level performance in both total return and in terms of nonaccruals and in terms of losses. Thinking about what we've run at an 8 basis point net loss rate. And so these facts do matter. Remember, yesterday, everyone, I'm sure, is tuned in to both, on the one hand, the software performance. But on the other, I mean, the software stock performance. But then folks that actually understand this, let's say, I think we can all agree, Jensen Huang has a pretty good understanding of AI, say this idea that AI is the end of software is one of the most ridiculous things he heard.

And the reason that's ridiculous is because AI -- software itself is not a monolith. Software, which it's a system of record where you are integrated into the business processes of large companies. And business processes are a big part of how companies operate, software is as an enabler. And the best companies what we are seeing that are embedded in that position and have data modes and operating environments like health care and financial services with 0 tolerance for risk environments, regulatory limitations, what we're seeing is they're the ones that are the adopters of AI. They're the ones that are then turning around and saying, "Here, I can offer you an agentic solution to replace some of your human costs, some of your labor costs by integrating these capabilities into the software, I already have resident in your system and fully integrated into your daily behavior."

So we understand the generic -- there are certain parts of software that are vulnerable and they are. We've studied our portfolios very carefully. We do not see any meaningful exposure to those more susceptible areas. We see deep exposure where we have it to businesses that have the attributes I described where there are actually very significant business processes, data and kind of environmental regulatory constraints, and we see them adopting agentic solutions.

Now as to the specific numbers, remember, we have a variety of different vehicles. And to be clear, the tech-only vehicles actually have the best credit performance. So I want to be clear, we're not negative in any manner on software. However, we also run diversified funds. If you take, for example, our continuously offered BDC, our credit fund, actually amongst the peer group, we have the lowest software exposure.

So again, even we're not a monolith, there's different strategies and different ways to participate in those strategies. But the reality is we don't see any material indication, any change in the accruals or nonaccruals asks for amendments. At this point, things look very healthy, which certainly gives us a meaningful, certainly a very meaningful runway.

Last point I'll say is the PE firms, let's remember, remain active in this space. I want to make sure one understands that software remains an area where sophisticated buyers are still highly active because, again, if you have the right software solutions, you're going to benefit from the adoption of AI. And so again, this monolithic view and action people are taking is going to prove, I think quite misguided and it's going to lead to a miss and significant opportunities.

The book is strong. We don't see meaningful losses. We don't see deterioration in performance. And last point, the typical duration of a loan remaining in our books, let's say, a software loan is a few years. So when you have a business that is still growing double digits, and only a few years left and a 70% equity cushion, all we're talking about is do we get our money back.

We're not a software company. We're not here to tell you whether the model will be better or worse, whether growth is higher or lower. We're not a software company. We're -- we are an asset manager. We're not a bank. We're an asset manager. We get paid to manage assets and do it well. And that's what we're doing very successfully. If the software business evolves over time, well, that will be to the maybe a benefit or loss of the equity holders, but we're in a position, we think, to continue to get our capital back and earn a very strong return.

The only thing I'll add quickly here, Craig, is, as I think we would all agree in this type of market environment, it's important to round down to the facts, the data so our publicly traded BDC OTF, 11.4% inception-to-date return, 18% NAV growth since inception, in this case, a positive net gain of 16 basis points since inception. Non-accruals is 0.1%. 0.1% of the portfolio. Average weighted EBITDA is almost $300 million, 94% leading private equity sponsor backed. And with 185 positions, it's 0.5% on average for a position size.

The next question comes from Glenn Schorr with Evercore ISI.

So I appreciate the comments you made earlier on the past periods of anxiety and how you've met all requests for [ tenders ] each those times. So my question is a little bit on, should this time be different? Meaning, we all got to live through the BREIT experience. And I felt like it trained the wealth channel to understand what semi-liquid or not so liquid means.

But you and others have gotten some high redemption requests and have been making good on them, a bit of a confidence in your portfolio, good thing. The flip side is what are we undoing in terms of the teachings we've taught in the channel on how these products are supposed to act and what investors are going to expect going forward? So I know it's a like it's a big picture thing, but I feel like it's really important because you have lots of products in the channel that we kind of want to smooth volatility over time.

Sure. Look, our job is to deliver for our investors, our LPs and our shareholders. And to do that, what that means is considering the results of a tender and what fulfilling those investor requests would do for remaining shareholders. .

And of course, obviously, by action, we're seeing the preferences of the shareholders that are seeking redemptions. We've seen these periods of volatility, as you know, we've seen the pattern of behavior where there is these moments of kind of fear and they -- in the face of facts, the facts again, will bear out this time. They tend to fade because performance, in fact, is strong and remains strong.

With regard to fulfilling tender requests or not, you're starting with something like liquidity management and portfolio position is a meaningful consideration. Indeed, there is a structure that has been built with this semi-liquid nature. And to your point, we say investors have been trained. I mean they're aware for sure, as they should be, that there are limits, and that limit might be the 5%.

But at the same time, investor behavior and the presence of limiting people can also be very negative. Remember how long you can get into a world of negative outflows, negative redemption cycles when people feel trapped. And if they're, in fact, really not trapped, what behavior are you conditioning people to understand. Are they -- is it just, look, the hard cap is a mechanical hard cap? Or is the hard cap the proper limitation unless you have the added flexibility to accommodate. I put it in the latter category. We manage our businesses with very low leverage.

We manage with a lot of liquidity. I'd say this with no arrogance. We're very good in both the liability and asset side of the book. In this instance, when we had these large adoption requests, we have lots and lots of liquidity, still do, lots of liquidity. There really was no reason to not fulfill investors' request for their capital back. And we see that as actually meeting investor needs, being an investor-friendly and investor-focused firm which we think leads to much quicker recoveries in fund flows and reached a much better performance as to say, growth in funds flows over time.

Pay attention to your customer, your client meet their needs. If you can't do that in a manner that would leave the remaining investors remain in portfolio in an equally or even perhaps better place that, of course, the limit is there for a good reason. But if you have plenty of capital as we did in these vehicles, then we fulfill those requests, and that is client -- meeting client needs, client satisfaction, and that will lead to more wealth growth over time.

The next question comes from Brian McKenna with Citizens.

So I had a question on OWLCX. There's clearly a ton of great momentum here. But a few things stand out to me, 80% of these assets are fixed rate, while leverage stands at just 0.2x, yet the strategy generated net returns of nearly 3% in the fourth quarter. So I'm curious, is there an opportunity to expand leverage here, drive even stronger performance over time. And then given the fixed nature of these assets, the fixed rate nature of these assets versus floating rate at the BDC. Are you seeing any incremental demand or an acceleration in flows into alternative credit more broadly?

Yes. Thank you, Brian. I appreciate the question. We think there's a very big opportunity in alternative credit. We think there's a big opportunity with the interval fund. We're actually really excited. We are in a very short time frame already over $100 million a month in flows with the interval funds. So we've made really great progress in a short amount of time.

When you think about overall opportunity in the wealth sector, first, let's talk about what does it take to be successful in the private wealth channels. We have large because you have to build the foundation and then using that foundation, how do you go out and expand and continue to grow even in environments like this. So -- we have a large, high-quality mostly, most importantly, well-performing products. How do you scale with wealth with well-performing products. That's the key to scaling these products.

Last year, we added 2 new wealth products, as we all know, ODIT, which is our digital infrastructure, wealth dedicated product than the interval fund, which you just asked about. So we now have 3 key categories: private real estate, private credit and private infrastructure. And so each one of our wealth products we offer is scale. We've been able to scale these very quickly, in particular, as I mentioned, the interval fund and ODIT. So all of our products are now of scale, and we're still in the early days. We know adoption rates are low.

And so there's no doubt that sentiment and demand will move around based on market conditions. Our expectation, though, is real assets and asset-based finance are of more interest today, and we're in a great position to take advantage of this. But now from a tactical execution perspective, and we're only able to do these things because we built that foundation. But what we're able to do now is to continue to look at new local feeder. So what did we do in 2025? We added a Japan feeder. We added an Australia feeder. So we're very focused on continuing to be able to do this into 2026. We are onboarding new distribution partners, either it's RIA platforms, wirehouses, private banks, independent broker dealers to continue to expand our distribution partners for each of our wealth dedicated products and expanding the amount of FAs that sell our products with existing distribution partners.

Now because we have large well-performing evergreen funds, as I just mentioned, we're now being placed in many model portfolios. And we expect to be in the forefront of adoption in this regard. And I guess, lastly, as the rulemaking around 401(k)s evolves, we have our partnership with Voya. We're launching our CIT shortly. Our target date funds will be out later this year. Just 2026 will still be more of a building year than a flows year, but there's a lot of momentum around this build. So we think there's a lot of runway here overall.

The next question comes from Bill Katz of TD Cowen.

It's a little bit of a 2-parter, so I apologize or violating the 1 question rule, but I think these are 2 things that [indiscernible] on the stock. First, can you help maybe unpack the disconnection that seems to be happening between the prolific CapEx cycle on the hyperscalers against the opportunity set that you speak to on the digital side? And maybe walk us through how you think about credit risk? And then the second thing that's been coming up quite a bit is can you reshape or just go through where you sit today versus your Investor Day goals and how you get to those goals given some of your '25 and now 2026 sort of implied guides?

So on the CapEx cycle, most clearly encapsulated yesterday in Google raising their CapEx guidance to $175 billion to $185 billion, up from $93 billion. This is something we've been talking about and is an enormous opportunity. As you know, we are in the premier position and premier provider of capital solutions to the hyperscalers that capital cycle is only accelerated.

Again, we're sometimes fact and fiction or too much noise, whether there is or isn't an AI bubble in valuations is secondary to the question of whether people with some of the largest market caps and best credit ratings in the world a, think otherwise and b, are willing to commit to 15- and 20-year leases, which they are with us, which is allowing us to deliver outstanding results for our investors in digital infrastructure and in triple net lease.

Remember, our ORENT product, as an example, delivered an 11% return this past year. We just raised the yield on our ORENT product to 7%. 7% exceeds the performance in and of itself of almost every other real estate product out there. So again, all the headlines and noise aside, facts matter. And we're delivering those results. We see that continued super cycle as a enormous opportunity. We know how to structure those leases so that are ironclad. We have a unique skill to actually build, develop, operate as people want it. We've done it with every one of big hyperscalers in terms of being their partner and proven we can be a really great partner, captured it perfectly in the Meta transaction.

So this is going to continue to be an area of great opportunity for LPs, investors by extension for us. You saw the great success we had in raising our latest Digital Infrastructure Fund III, which we already are heavily invested. So we'll be back this year with Digital Infrastructure Fund IV. You saw our real estate fund, which was closed in fourth quarter 2024. We're already back, as you know, and well down the path toward our target on our next real estate fund.

So we have big successful flagships that are both raising faster, deploying faster and very importantly, most important delivering spectacular results for our investors. And that makes us a pretty special animal and last note in the wealth channel. ORENT has become the market leader by every measure. We have raised over the last 2 years, $5.5 billion with almost no redemptions. This has become a gigantic and market-leading product because it's different. It's better. Back to this question, these are not monolithic answers. Our job is to deliver exceptional results. That's what we've done, and we think we're positioned to do that across the board on our products.

So Bill, on your second question, as it stands now, we're behind our Investor Day goals. Now remember, we're just 1 year into a 5-year long-term target. But we've seen in the last few months, we've had headwinds in private credit, AI, software. We've seen a slowdown for nontraded BDCs and private wealth flows. We've seen an increase in the tenders for nontraded BDCs.

So what you heard in my prepared remarks is we believe we can show a modest increase in the growth rate of FRE per share in '26 versus '25. And we feel we can accelerate that growth in '27 versus '26. We also brought our FRE margins above our initial guide of 57 to 58, and we have another guide out there with another modest increase in 2026 versus 2025.

The next question comes from Crispin Love with Piper Sandler.

On software exposure and the metrics, can you just let us know what needs to happen for you to take losses in your software portfolio and then impacts the net returns to your end investors, just from a standpoint of LTVs, how much is first lien senior secured remaining maturities there, private equity value structure that would need to happen ahead of you.

And then if there are company failing how you think about recoveries? I'm just trying to differentiate between equity and debt here and then what could happen in a draconian scenario because that's what it seems that markets are pricing in today? And then just what is software exposure as a percent of total AUM? .

So it's a really important question you're asking. And again, let me just be really factual for a moment. The stock -- equity versus debt is kind of an important starting point, all of this is getting conflated. Over the last 3 years, the software index is up 23%. We all read it about and know what happened last year. It's down 20% now in the last year, but it's up 23% over the last 3 years.

So if you think about that as some indicator of the vintage, a lot of big software deals PE firms did, employing a fact, software equities, equities are up. We are a first lien lender in almost every instance when we talk about software. We are, on average, around 30% loan to value. So what's happened objectively in the marketplace is since the vintage of those transactions, equity values on average are up 23%, but pick whatever number you want. We started at 30%. So now let's answer your question.

In order for us to have material losses, I can't describe for you anything based in fact, anything based on any measure of default rates recoveries that would lead to a material degradation in performance of the funds. There's not a mathematical -- of course, I can do it in math. But there's no relation to any practical statistic that would lead to anything other than sure, you could have a lower return for a year, you kind of a lower return for a couple of years. But you have to destroy 70% of the value of every one of these software companies when the markets actually judge the net up.

And again, it's not a model then. We do a lot of software very consciously, they're not simple application layer. We're doing things that are business process oriented, have data moats and work in low risk -- low error tolerance environments. And that's why, in fact, in the fourth quarter, currently, the companies are actually performing mid-teens growth still. So I can't really answer it in the mathematical way because the numbers would be so silly to try to create anything more than -- of course, there will be losses. I want to be clear.

We're in the lending business. We have 400 companies. And of course, there's losses. Every quarter, we're going to have companies that go and get in trouble and companies that get out of trouble. And even trouble doesn't mean we've lost anything. It means they might be struggling. We may have to own them. But that's already built into the calculation. And that's what -- with all that said, we've been running at 8 basis points net. So the real answer, you are correct, is there's an awful lot of noise about what is the equity of a software company worth. Again, we're not a software company. So I'm not here to really answer that question.

But I can tell you that when you have a portfolio of loans to software companies that are, on average, growing significantly generating a lot of cash, have a 3-year tenor on average or so left and are currently in very healthy positions to get from that to all the value's been destroyed and you have a credit loss is a journey that just doesn't make sense. And that's the way this broad paint brush is being used today. They are big companies that are deeply embedded. Our software companies have hundreds of millions of dollars of average EBITDA that are deeply embedded in Fortune 500 work processes.

And for those who have got to pause and think, there's not just a matter of technology, there's the adoption of behavior. And for those on the call that are thinking Fortune 500 companies are going to take all their software and just rip it out and just say, I'll just ask ChatGPT. That's simply not the way it works, don't take my word for it again. We're not technologists, take Jensen Huang's words for it.

I can answer one part of that mathematically, which is the total exposure of software loans across our AUM is 8%.

The next question comes from Benjamin Budish with Barclays Capital.

Alan, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the FRE margin outlook for the year. I know in Q4, actually, if you could unpack that a little bit as well, it looks like your FRE comp expense line steps down quite significantly. So I'm curious if there's anything going on there to call out? And then just as you think through next year, what are the key pieces of the operating leverage? Is it more cost controls?

And I'm curious how you see -- or how you would sensitize that to the potential paths for especially the nontraded BDCs where we've seen a couple of months of slower flows, elevated redemptions, it's not quite clear how things are going to shake out. So I know there's a couple of things in there, but just curious to get your thoughts.

Sure. Ben, I appreciate the question. So in 2025, we brought down expenses. We see the full year that comes together in 4Q when we make our year-end compensation decisions. And we're very focused as a management team on showing progress on the FRE margin. Again, we guided 57% to 58%. We wanted to make sure we came in a little above that. We came in at 58.3%. And as we think about 2026, you're, of course, right, there is uncertainty today.

Good news, we have seen a general stability in the daily flows of our wealth products. So that's all the data we have through the first, I don't know, months -- a little more than a month, but it's encouraging that we've seen a general stabilization there. And the answer for 2026 is simple, we need to have revenue growth outpace expense growth. So we have some levers on the revenue side, and we have some levers on the expense side. And we will use those levers accordingly to guide to that 58.5% FRE margin increase from 2025.

The next question comes from Patrick Davitt with Autonomous Research.

Obviously, a lot of direct lending noise kind of a [indiscernible] where that's going at this point. But it seems like the ABF business did quite well. So can you give us a little bit more color on what percentage of your total credit AUM is now not direct lending? And then maybe help frame what you're thinking about or modeling for growth in that side of the business this year. And then specifically, I think you said LCX is at $1.8 billion. So does that mean it has taken in $550 million in 1Q? Or is there something else in the bridge from $1.25 billion in the deck?

Thanks, Patrick. There's a little debt on that. So I think we've raised about $1.3 billion in inflows with a little debt that takes us to about $1.8 billion. We're about 30% of our credit business away from direct lending. So we've diversified quite a bit from just a year or 1.5 years ago, let's say. Alternative credit, I have some interesting stats that I think are worth running through. Alternative credit is definitely a large growth area for us. We've talked about both alternative credit and digital infrastructure. We view those as having at least the same opportunity in terms of future growth.

And when I say future growth, I'm talking 3- to 5-year growth as what we saw with our [ Upstart ] acquisition. So a couple of very quick data points. Let's look, we're now 1 year in on our 2 acquisitions for Atalaya and for IPI. Let's flash back very quickly to our net lease business, which, as of today, has grown almost 4x revenue growth and almost 4x AUM. And so that's extraordinary growth. I know everyone has seen that. We've talked about that. So 1 year into our net lease business, we acquired Oak Street we were at $15.5 billion of AUM. The following year, we raised $3.5 billion. So that's a low 20s percent growth rate.

That's 1 year in. And remember, the first year is usually the hardest. You have integration. You have streamlining everything. You have a lot of work to do. Now let's flash forward digital infrastructure. We are now 1 year in. So what's the head-to-head comparison. We closed at $14 billion. We raised about $3 billion in 2025 in our Digital Infrastructure Business. That is also the same low 20s percent growth rate. So we have already accomplished at least what we've done in digital infrastructure is what we did in net lease 1 year in.

Now let's look at alternative credit. I'm glad you asked specifically about that. Alternative credit, we closed a little more than a year ago. We closed at $10.5 billion. We've raised nearly $4 billion since then. So that's a high 30s percent growth off of where we closed our Atalaya acquisition. So we're really proud of what we accomplished here. We see a lot of growth ahead, in particular for alternative credit and digital infrastructure. We have, obviously, Mark mentioned Fund IV in the back half of this year coming out. We have both wealth products for digital infrastructure and alternative credit wrapping up ASOF IX coming out with more fundraise and alternative credit in 2026.

And what we're really excited about is now flash forward 1 or 2 or 3 more years, what does that arc of trajectory? And how does that compare to our Oak Street acquisition. And we still feel as much as ever, the conviction that these acquisitions will be the same or more than what we were able to do with the Oak Street acquisition.

And I'll add 1 point, and then we'll move on. We're also building organic products. Not to be lost in all of this. We mentioned this -- I mentioned this in my comments, our [indiscernible] product all strategic equity GP-led secondaries, which we stood up at a time when people said, I don't even understand what this business is, which now, as you are well aware, probably, has grown to become a huge share of the overall secondary market, both LP and GP and a meaningful contributor to the liquidity environment for PE. That's now a $2.5 billion profit that we started from scratch.

And that's a product that we see enormous potential for over time. We think that's a way, for example, both the institutions and individual investors truly participate in the very best of private equity from the very best firms in this multitrillion dollar industry. So there's another example of just the growth legs that lie outside of direct lending. We still think direct lending. It's going to prove to be an outstanding business. Facts matter. The results are, and we expect continue to be very, very strong.

But yes, we're delighted with the performance of asset-backed and we're delighted with the growth in those businesses. We're delighted with digital infrastructure and with our real estate businesses that are growing dramatically, and we're continuing to turn in great performance in our GP Stakes business. And that -- those are all things that count that will drive that future growth.

The next question comes from Wilma Burdis with Raymond James.

Could you build a little bit on your earlier comments on fundraising momentum so far in 1Q '26? And just give us a little bit more color on what you're seeing in both the retail and institutional side.

Sure. Thank you, Wilma. So we included a slide in our earnings presentation where we show kind of the step functions that we've been talking about throughout 2025. And we're really proud of what we've been able to accomplish. You can see meaningful increases here on Slide 6 for each of the last 2 years. We raised $42 billion in 2025 and a lot of momentum on the institutional side, record year for institutional and a record year for wealth. .

As we think about 2026, and I commented on the daily flows, so that's as much data as we have right now in the wealth kind of how do we think about 2026. So we're encouraged by a general stabilization there in the daily flows. Overall, if I were to pull the lens back here, we have wrapping up Net Lease VII, wrapping up GP VI Back half of this year, Digital Infrastructure IV. As we've talked about, we have our 2 newly launched wealth products plus our 3 original wealth products, if you will, [ OCIC ] and ORENT. So when you put all of that together, we can certainly see another year where we put up a similar level in '25 as we did in '26.

The next question comes from Mike Brown of UBS.

So I appreciate all the color on the software side this morning. I guess I'll ask a different question. I wanted to ask on the capital allocation side. So you declared a dividend of $0.92 for 2026, so a modest bump year-over-year. How are you thinking about the dividend growth from here, along with the payout ratios and maybe just overall capital flexibility going forward?

Thanks, Mike. I appreciate the question. A lot of the same. So modest dividend growth. We're bringing our payout ratio down we are at 107%, 108% payout ratio for '25. We're bringing that down. It's going to take a couple of steps as we've talked about in the past to bring that payout ratio back to. And this isn't hardwired, but a general ballpark of 85%. We wanted to show some level of modest growth. And we'll -- we expect to continue to do that as we bring that payout ratio back down to that 85% level. Yes, of course. And as I said, over the course of the next few years. .

The next question comes from Brennan Hawken of BMO.

You spoke to the flexibility and ability to provide liquidity by raising the threshold for OTIC, which was, I would agree, was certainly encouraging. That product was sort of heavily distributed throughout Asia. What I'm curious about is, I know you've got distribution across the world. What does the wealth management AUM look like by geography? Like what portion is U.S. versus Asia versus Europe?

So the bulk of our assets and our products is U.S. based to the wealth products. So just to cut to the chase, OTIC is really, in our world, the exception, not the rule and there's history that we don't need to get into it at a time to get into now. But the time of that launch led to less wide distribution, which is done to concentration in Asia, we actually really don't have meaningful exposure in Asia in any of the other products.

Really, they are very domestic and the behavior patterns are very different between those products.

Very little.

So very little outside the U.S. and our other products. So OTIC is kind of an exception corner case of its own, I wouldn't read much into OTIC across to other products of ours.

Okay. Well, I appreciate that. Is it possible to get a number maybe ex OTIC, where that stands because very little is sort of subjective?

We'll try to get back to the number. It's a very, very small part. I appreciate that is subjective. We'll get back to you with a number.

The next question comes from Kenneth Worthington with JPMorgan.

This is Alex Bernstein on for Ken. Congrats on the strong metrics that we're seeing in triple net lease in particular, really showing differentiation. Touching upon direct lending and originations in particular. We saw that both gross and net moved up this quarter for the second quarter in a row similarly, the gross to net conversion ratio improved a little bit.

I'm getting in the high 20s percentages. As we zoom out and look at a full year over full year comparison, still seeing the gross net and conversion are all still lower. I wanted to think through those metrics, how they're evolving relative to historic levels, I think, especially on the gross net, which I understand historically is a bit higher competition with the banks, how that looks. And then maybe how you're thinking about deployment potentially being impacted or not by some of the sentiment in the market, especially if we're seeing slower subscription at least on that basis growth for the BDCs.

Sure. The gross to net, you observed the patterns, I won't repeat all of the facts. We continue to see a very strong pipeline of activity. We are certainly participating in what we think are a lot of great new originations and credits. We're certainly getting at least our fair share business is good. I think we continue to build ever deeper relationships with the users of our capital. So right now, it's really more about overall PE activity within direct lending.

Obviously, as we just talked about, enormous activity in things like the real estate business and in alternative credit away from PE activity. But it's really about the PE cycle and how much transaction is occurring there. We certainly have seen upticks and we're seeing an uptick there for in our inbounds, our demand for capital. And I guess the only silver lining of all of this kind of misinformation about credit and misinformation about software and the like, usually, that environment ends up leading to better spreads and a rotation of more product back to the private market because the public market gets deeply disrupted. So all the indicators would point favorably as far as we can see, but it will all the [indiscernible] up really at the end of the day on just how much activity is their in PE world in a given quarter. .

And the only thing I'll follow up with is about 7% -- 6% to 7% of non-U.S. dollars in our other wealth products. So as Marc said, it's a very small number.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I'll turn the call to Marc Lipschultz for closing remarks.

Great. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. We know that the hour is up. And so we will release it to the next activity, except to say, at the end of the day, this was a great quarter. We continue to see very healthy portfolios. At the end of the day, performance is the ultimate measure, not anecdote, and performance is top tick in all of the products that we talked about. So we have a very favorable view going into 2026 and look forward to updating you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.

All right. Thank you, everybody. We'll get started with our next session. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Up next, I'd love to welcome -- I'd like to welcome, Doug Ostrover, co-CEO of Blue Owl. Owl is one of the largest global alternative asset managers with nearly $300 billion in assets under management, specializing in private credit, GP solutions and real assets. Building on success over the course of 2025, I will continue to expand into some of the fastest growth areas of private markets such as digital assets and alternative credit, which I'm sure we'll talk quite a bit about with Doug today. Thank you so much for joining us. Always a pleasure to have you here. So good to see you.

Thanks, and great to be here. What number am I for you today?

Today, nine. Over the last two days, 25, 26. I got to figure out if I'm better off being one or nine...

No, this is good.

You have me warmed up. So this is actually kind of perfect. Okay, so why don't we start with some of the priorities for you guys for 2026. Obviously, '25 has been a busy year. This was definitely a bit of an execution year after a number of deals that you've announced, really spending the product set, expanding the capabilities, expanding your distribution reach, what's kind of on the to-do list and key priorities for '26 for you?

Well, again, thanks for having me, and everybody, thanks for taking the time today. So I think you summed it up in your question, and that is, as I think about '24, '24 we were really focused on let's diversify the business. '25 was let's integrate all those acquisitions and get synergies. And then '26 now is just execution. So what are we trying to execute on? Well, one, things like margin. We've spent a lot of money and not that you're going to see margins pop up 200 basis points in a quarter, but what we hope you'll see over time is a nice gradual uptick in margins, something we weren't focused on. We're also focused on FRE per share. Something else we weren't looking at. We were in growth mode, we are really focused on those two metrics. How do we get there? Well, clearly, one is fundraising. And as you know, we've got a bunch of flagship funds in the market, and we're in the market. Our real estate fund, we have on the cover. It's our triple net lease fund, $7.5 billion. If you remember, when we first bought that business, they had just finished a $2.5 billion fund, then we did $5 billion, $7.5 billion, cautiously optimistic we'll exceed that. We're finishing up GP stakes. Again, we'll have a lot more to say about that in the first quarter. But we want to get that wrapped up in the first six months. We have our digital infrastructure fund, our last fund was $7 billion. Yes, we're going to be back in the market. I believe sometime in the second quarter. We'll talk in February about sizing of that fund, but I think it could be materially bigger. On the alternative asset side, we're wrapping up our new -- our latest institutional fund. We have $2.5 billion on the cover. We'll hit that and hopefully hit the hard cap. On the wealth side, you and I were just talking a little bit about credit, and I'm sure we'll spend a lot of time talking about credit. Look, we'll talk about the resiliency, and why we think that is just a core asset for almost all of our investors. So we're expecting continued growth there. But we're really excited about digital infrastructure. You saw we launched the new fund. It's the fastest we've ever gotten to just under $2 billion. And we have high aspirations for what we can do there. And then on the alternative credit side as well, a lot less competition than what we're seeing in direct lending. We are fortunate to partner with the old Atalaya firm with 20-year track record. We launched our wealth product there, got to $1 billion, and I think that could scale pretty quickly as well. One quick comment on those -- just those two wealth products. In '24, when we were talking about acquisitions, and we did some in '25 and digital infrastructure, I believe, closed in January of this year. One of the things we said when we're buying them is they're accretive day 1, if we can scale them institutionally and get them into wealth, then we can make it really work for our shareholders. And you'll notice on those two funds in under a year in each of them, we scaled it, we're in wealth, and they're poised to really grow. So excited about all of that.

Now lots to look forward to...

One last thing I didn't mention that was a little out of our control. This was a number we missed on a little bit this year was deployment. I remember sitting up here with you, I think maybe I went seventh last year, but I -- is that a bad thing that I'm moving backwards?

No, no, no. We'll find out next year.

But I remember sitting up here with you and not just myself, but everybody who came up prior to me, we were all very bullish on the M&A environment. Deployment is very important for a lot of our funds. And while it was okay this year, it was definitely below expectations. And a combination of we earn fees when it's deployed, and we generate some origination fees, it definitely came in less than what we are hoping. We're -- it feels like things are better. I don't want to go out on a limb again and project it, but that's the other variable that we're cautiously optimistic.

Yes. I mean for what it's worth, it's pretty consistent with what others across both the old space, but also the banks and which have signaled about the M&A outlook for next year. So things crossed this time around actually kind of comes to fruition.

Yes.

Okay, let's talk about private credit. And I really want to zone in on performance. I think you guys and really the whole peer group have done a really good job outlining the merits of direct lending solution in private credit and kind of trying to dispel some of the kind of media headlines that are out there. But nonetheless, it's still really topical. And the way I want to zone in on that is really from the perspective of underlying portfolio company performance. We know what the non-accruals are. We obviously see the filings we hear how you talk about the credit trends. But when you look at the performance of the underlying credits, whether it's revenue growth, EBITDA growth, EBITDA margins, particularly in a more tech-oriented software businesses, give us a sense of kind of how that's shaping up to maybe build some additional credibility about the credit trends?

Okay. So let me talk broadly about our funds, and then I'll finish up on software and maybe a little bit on -- we were talking in some one-on-ones, just about a GFC-type scenario. So look, I understand why there's some nervousness with private debt. It's grown a lot. There's been a lot of negative articles, and I'm glad you're asking the question. But I think the key is to kind of pull the curtain back and take a look at what's actually happening in the funds. And I would tell you, and I talked to some of our peers, who are having a similar experience, and I'm sure they said this. Underlying performance is good. And so just some basic metrics of our book. Our average company has about $275 million of EBITDA. So we play in upper middle market. These are good-sized businesses. Our loan-to-value on a corporate credit is about 39%. Our loan-to-value on a software loan is about 30%. Our average position size is about 20 basis points. In terms of performance, have things slowed down a little bit versus a few quarters ago? Yes. Now remember, where we invest, we're -- it's not really indicative of the U.S. economy because we don't do things like deep cyclicals oil and gas, commodity chemicals, retail, we're looking for in businesses that are much more annuity like. And so we're seeing very few defaults. We're not adding names to the watch list. And as I said a couple of quarters ago, probably seeing 8% to 9% revenue and EBITDA growth. Now it's more maybe 1 to 1.5 points slower, 7.5% to 8%, but still very, very robust. So I -- most of the companies that we look at, worst case, we get quarterly, many quarterly financials, many I get monthly. And so I can look at our portfolio, and I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that for the next 18 to 24 months, and I can't go longer because it's hard to predict. But I can tell you with a high degree of certainty, the funds are going to perform really well. And that's because if you look at a company, companies just -- their earnings just don't go like this, right? You know when you're looking at a business when it's going through some sort of secular decline, it's slow, it trends down and then -- over a period of a couple of years. So I see what's happening in the portfolio. I'm not seeing that. And so I feel pretty good about where it's trending, what it looks like. People are saying, well, returns will be lower than they were a few years ago. No doubt. And by the way, we tell our investors, our goal in all of these funds, these are substitutes for what you can get in fixed income. And so we want to make roughly 200 -- anywhere from 150 to 250 basis point spread versus the syndicated loan market. But I'll give you an idea today, and this is why I know Blackstone's redemptions came out. We don't have ours yet. I know the market reacted negatively. But think about it as an investor. If you want fixed income, where'd you go? I was looking at one of the big high income funds. I think it was Fidelity. It's yielding at 670, and we can generate 9%. That's unsecured. We can generate 9% secured loans. So it just makes sense, and I think it's really compelling. Let me just jump to tech for a minute. I'm -- so when we talk about our tech fund, we are talking about large-cap, mission-critical software. Large enterprise software, where we have worked with these companies for years. There's no churn. And so the question is, where are these businesses heading. Now if you just take a step back, the first reaction, the knee-jerk reaction is always AI, it's going to make these businesses obsolete. If you go out and talk to venture firms, the PE firms who invest in them, they would tell you that's just factually incorrect. The pricing model will have to change. And most likely, the ability to keep upselling will come down. So growth is going to compress. And in an environment where we have some compression and growth, what's the terminal value of the business. And so our loans are at 30% loan to value. And so we look at it and say, we can absorb a reasonable amount of compression and enterprise value and still get our money back. And I actually -- I was just going through this with somebody in a one-on-one, so you bear with me. But I found this kind of interesting. There's a software index XSW. It's 140 large mid-cap and small-cap software and IT companies. Everything's equal weight. For the year, what do you think the index is up or down?

Down.

Down 3%. That -- now given everything going on in AI, you would think it would be a lot worse. Then there's one IGV, another ETF. This -- what this one does, the top 10 software companies are 50% weighted. And so Palantir, Microsoft really skew it. This fund is up for the year. So what I decided to do was go look at the top drawdowns in software. So names like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Adobe, Workday, and what you would find is for these companies, and these are the biggest drawdowns, they're down on average about 30%. So let me describe a typical software deal for us, $1 billion enterprise value, $300 million of debt, $700 million of equity. Let's just say -- and I just showed you most are flat, but let's just say it has a big drawdown like these funds. So instead of being worth $1 billion, it's now worth $700 million. So now the cap stack would be $300 million of our debt and $400 million of equity. So our loan to value goes from 30% to 42%. I'd rather it be a 30%, but nobody would look at that and say, "Ah, you're going to have a lot of defaults." The other thing is the average life of those loans is roughly 2 to 2.5 years. So we -- on our software book over a 9-year period, we have not lost a single dollar. And I would tell you, looking at the book today, again, we feel really good about it. The returns have been stellar, and I expect they'll continue to be quite good.

Great. That's really helpful color. I appreciate spending time on that. Okay, let's turn our attention to maybe dynamics in the wealth channel. Super important growth engine for you guys. You've been there really from the beginning. You were there early. I think about $16 billion of inflows over the last 12 months. At a high level, first, talk to us a little bit how the footprint of your wealth channel has changed. And so the key priorities as you push further ahead into that world and '26, both in terms of products and geographies.

So it's pretty interesting. If you went back 10 years ago when we launched the firm, the credit business, almost all the major firms, what they were dealing, what they were -- they had an adviser, sub-adviser model in wealth. What that means is the big alternative manager was managing the capital, and they were outsourcing fundraising. And so when I launched our credit business, I looked at that and said, "I thought we could do it better, and the way to do it better was to bring it in-house." We probably started with Alan is here, our CFO, he thought I was crazy at the time. We probably started with 40, 50 people in that space. It took a long time to get it ramped up. We had one BDC, we were marketing, fast forward to today, to answer your question about where we are today, we have over 200 people. We're obviously heavily weighted here in the U.S., Canada, all throughout Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, opening -- building out a team in the Middle East, basically everywhere in the world. We think it's still very early days. We have five products in the market, and we'd like to have more. And I think one of the negatives for our business is that we're a younger firm. We are very focused on having a few products and being a market leader in everything we do. But that means we can only have so many products in market, whereas some of the bigger alternative managers who have a much broader suite of products, they can launch more. So I'm pleased with how we're positioned. I think most importantly, I was mentioning to you, if you look at the alternative asset-backed business, if you look at the data center business, why were we able to launch these funds so quickly in a crowded marketplace. The reason is we've been at it for 10 years. We have a lot of credibility in the marketplace. We have a lot of the advisers who know and like us. And we've -- and most importantly, we've delivered on exactly what we said we would do. And so that allows us to get into the market and quickly execute. In terms of what else will bring to market, too early to say, but I just want you to know, we don't sit in a vacuum and say, "Hey, we want to bring x to market." What we do is we start early with the big wirehouses and the big power users at these firms about, "Hey, we think there's an opportunity in x, what do you think?" So we start building a consensus really early on, and that gives us the comfort that whatever it is, we're going to be able to do or the product we go after that we can launch it into those wealth channels.

Great. All right. Let's double-click on a couple of things that you guys see on the ground. You mentioned, obviously, non-traded BDCs. The market continues to be hyper-focused on that whole subsector of this whole wealth ecosystem just given how much it's grown, right? I mean it's been a big driver for not just you guys, but for a lot of the firms in the old space with the wealth product in direct lending. Sales as of December 1 have clearly slowed down for you guys and for your peers now that we've seen a couple of larger ones in terms of December 1st subscriptions. Perhaps not surprising given the barrage of headlines in the last two to three months, what do you hear on the ground from financial advisers in terms of kind of like their level of concern and whether or not this is likely to be just a new norm and maybe it's because level rates, tighter spreads, headlines, and now we're kind of a new slightly lower paradigm for growth in that part of the business? Or there are reasons to be optimistic and think this is just going to be a blip and we kind of reaccelerate from here?

Well, it's really hard for me to pinpoint exactly what's going on because we have hundreds of thousands of people in those funds. And of course, we're talking to the biggest advisers constantly, but it's hard to get to everyone. So I'll just give you just my view from 30,000 feet and that is, when we went through COVID, we had bigger redemptions and slower -- less money coming in. When SVB went bankrupt, when we had tariffs. Whenever there's blip or nervousness in the markets, we see things accelerate in terms of redemptions and inflows slow down. And I think this is no different this time. But let me just share with you where we spend a lot of time with advisers, with the home offices. What do we talk about? What we talk about is, I know there's been negative press. Let us give you the actual math of what happens in something like a GFC. And if you go and look, the syndicated loan market, I had a direct lending book, but -- and I didn't experience this, but the stat is 12% default set here. And if you have 12% defaults, and we would expect much higher recoveries than this, but let's say it's $0.50 recoveries. Remember, we're investing, let's call it, a 40% loan to value. So if you get $0.50, that company is recovering 20 of the purchase price. So let's use 50. 12% defaults, $0.50. That's 6% loss. We use a turn of leverage, that's 12 points of loss, but we have about 10 points of income. So it's somewhere between 2%, 3%, 4%, maybe 5% loss in a very diversified, well-run senior secured loan fund. The equity market in 2008, it was down 38%. So I just keep coming back that we'll have these periods where things will pick up, there'll be nervousness, but at the end of the day, we believe we're providing higher income that investors can find anywhere else in the market. And if you run it well, we can really protect the downside. And that's -- and so I think it will remain a core part of everybody's portfolio. There will be periods where inflows accelerated, and we're probably in one of those periods where it's going to slow down, and we're going to see some outflows, but I'm still pretty bullish about it. And I can tell you, speaking to the leadership of the big wirehouses, they're also pretty excited still.

Yes. Okay. Makes sense. ORENT, that's been a really nice part of the story, and it really does feel like it's accelerating without much of a macro help and then lower rates presumably make that even a little bit more interesting. So what are your expectations on the momentum in that product, both in terms of same-store sales on the existing platforms as well as some of the newer places where you're adding it still?

Yes. I'm excited about where we're positioned there. I think we're the best-selling real estate fund. It's -- for those who don't know it, it's a triple net lease fund. It's had great performance. We raised a lot of money in a fairly short period of time, and it feels like that's accelerating because we're expanding the number of platforms we're on, and most people have never looked at a triple net lease fund. So there's a real education process there. So we're excited. We have -- surprisingly, we have a very big backlog there. So we have the backlog to support the growth. And what's interesting is, and you know this better than anyone, there are not a lot of big pools focused on triple net lease. There's a lot of small pools. And so going out and being able to deliver large wholesale solutions, I don't want to say we're the only one because certainly a Blackstone real estate fund, other real estate funds can do it, but it's not their core competency. So yes, I remain super excited about that, and I think we'll see a lot of growth there.

Great. Let's talk about some new things. I know I asked you what are some new products you're planning to come to market with, but you just did come to market with two pretty sizable new launches. So let's talk about those two, so both on the old credit and most recently with respect to digital infrastructure product as well. Super exciting launch, almost $1.7 billion, $700 million of that in the wealth channel alone, give or take, lessons learned so far? And kind of how do you think about the trajectory for both of those over the next six -- 12, 13 months?

Well, look, I'm really excited about both. And so maybe what I'll do is, I I'll just give you a couple of headlines on each. I direct -- direct lending. In the data center business, you know this, I'm readably bullish on it. And I think it's important. We were talking about triple net lease. Think about what we do in triple net lease. We go to an investment-grade company. It's usually a BBB, BBB- business, could be Walgreens, could be Cracker Barrel. We've done stuff for Whirlpool. But a lot of disparity in terms of credit quality, good assets, but we expect to get paid. They are signing anywhere from 15- to 20-year leases with 3% escalators. And as you know, in our institutional fund, we've generated in excess of 20% returns in that product. So now we're faced with an opportunity, where instead of working with Walgreens, Cracker Barrel, firms like that, we can go to Microsoft, Meta, Google, Apple, the biggest companies in the world sign the identical 20-year leases, get higher cap rates, same 3% escalators. And the way we look at it to our downside is even if the facilities are worth zero, at the end of their lives, we can still make a [ teens ] return. So what we're asking investors to do is to say, "Oh, can met a Microsoft, Google, Apple, pay you over -- pay their lease over a 20-year period." I'm not saying it's impossible they won't pay, but it's highly improbable. These are some of the best companies in the world. Average credit rating is A to AA. And the imbalance between demand and supply here, I've never seen a market like this. Think about this for a minute. We are in a position where we are going out and solving problems for the biggest companies in the world. It shouldn't exist. I shouldn't be able to make those kind of returns. And yet, there's -- the demand for compute is here, the supply is here. And I would tell you being in the space now heavily active for the last year. I see that demand accelerating, and I don't see the supply increasing. So I think this arbitrage is going to exist for some time. I know we're running out of time. We are one of the market leaders, and there's a very interesting moat around this. To give you an idea, we have a 1,000-person team, a 1,000 people that act as a GC building these facilities, and we have built 110 of them. And so if you're walking into a hyperscaler, and you have land, and you have the ability to get power, they've worked with us, they know our terms, they know that we can deliver. And very few firms can do that. So I'm unbelievably excited about it, and I think it has the potential to really scale. I don't want to oversell it, though, in the sense that like anything, when you launch something in wealth, the super users, the most sophisticated users come in quickly. Then we have to get out and get out in the branches. And this is why we have 200-odd people and start telling the story. So I expect we'll have nice flows, and we should expect it to accelerate. I'll just touch on alternative credit really quickly, equally as excited there. In my view, a lot less competition than direct lending. Returns are higher. And again, there's an interesting moat you need, the expertise. For those who don't follow us as closely. We bought a business called Atalaya, a little over a year ago, a 20-year track record in the asset-backed space. When we brought them in, our goal, as I mentioned this year, was integration. First thing that I really wanted to focus on was they focused on just the stuff at the bottom of the cap stack where you can get a lot of yield. They were creating a massive amount of investment-grade product, but they had nowhere to go with it. And so I wanted to get that synergy with our insurance business. And so we have really executed on that. We are creating in every vertical you can imagine, proprietary product, and I think that's going to really allow us to scale insurance, so that was one. Two was, I wanted to get the institutional fundraise done, I mentioned. And we're basically done with that. And then I wanted to get the retail fund done. To give you an idea of the myriad of product that we see. I think it came out publicly. We're working on a big transaction with SoFi. And you should know these are basically prime loans we're buying, average FICO score of 750, nice subordination. I'm -- really good alignment with SoFi, making, we believe, a very healthy return. We're working with somebody in the freight business. I think they're split rated between single and double A on helping them finance buying a new fleet of freighters with a 15-year lease, nice escalators. And then we're working with somebody who has rolled up the dental space, and we provide all the financing for dental equipment. So the TAM in this bracket is massive. And we have a big team that has played in all of these areas, lots of expertise. And as I was saying, higher yields, less competition. So I think that is -- has the potential to be a really big vertical.

Yes, that's interesting. Couple of minutes left on the clock. I want to get to maybe some of the financial items. And you actually started with that. You gave us a lot to think about in terms of the fundraising outlook for 2026. But within that, you also talked about FRE margins and also FRE per share. We haven't heard you guys talk a lot about FRE margins in the past, Alan smiling. But look, as you think about the trajectory of your investment spend, what do you feel like you have now the ability to pull back? Where do you see the margins going over the next couple of years? And at the same token, we saw you guys do a small buyback, presumably, that could also become a part of the growth algo at some point of time. So how should we think about both of those elements of the story that could obviously enhance the EPS growth of the company?

Yes. Well, first of all, I'll just reiterate that. We are very focused on margins now. It's not that we ever let our margins get too low. They've always been high by industry standards. But we understand the marketplace wants to see us improving those margins. And I think we're very committed every quarter to making sure they're stepping up on their way to what I think we talked about a while back, around 60%. We were less fixated on FRE per share. I know that's an important metric to the market. And we hope to have the same trends there. We're stepping up every single quarter. In terms of where we're taking the business, I think in February, we will be in a position to give really good guidance for '26. And then longer term, we're still standing behind what we gave at Investor Day, growing this business to somewhere around $3 billion of FRE. We still feel pretty confident about that. We know the levers we need to pull to get there. And so we're looking forward to getting after it in '26.

Great. And then strategically, I'll end where we sort of started where you were really busy diversifying the business a year ago. You've done a bunch of deals. You're in the process of really scaling them now. Anything else in the next 12 to 18 months that looks interesting where M&A could still make sense, or the focus is really still like let just double down on what we build and grow that?

Well, the focus definitively is on, let's focus on what we have and grow it. I am not exaggerating, a couple of times a week, we get a call from bankers directly from alt managers about, "Hey, we would like to talk to you about joining the firm." And I'll just leave you with this thought, and that is, as we think about any acquisition; one, we're looking for things. It will never be as good as the data center space. But where the demand is here, and the supply is here, it has to be a big market, where we can come in and fill that void, and we want to become one of the market leaders, if not the market leader. We're also really focused on products that have high current income, where we can protect the downside. And the best products are like triple net lease, where we have that, and we can get some unconstrained right-tail risk. So in that case, we -- as I mentioned, earning in excess of 20%. So I would just tell you the [ math ] side of it is easy. We know what we want. The culture side is the hardest piece. And the bar is really high there. As you said, we've made a bunch of acquisitions. So the focus right now is on doing -- taking care of business in-house, everything we bought, I know we're out of time, we have a bunch of organic things we're working on. So I think we have enough on our plate. I don't want to say it's impossible just because you know my DNA, but I'd say, it's not anything we're really focused on right now.

Great. Okay. Well, we'll leave it there, Doug. Good to see you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

All right. I know everyone is eating their lunch here filing in, but why don't we get going? Hopefully, everyone can hear us okay. My name is Brian McKenna. I cover the alternative asset managers and the BDCs and equity research at Citizens. I've actually covered this space for over a decade now. So I've seen firsthand the evolution of the industry, the business model, what's been incredible growth, and most importantly, really strong investment performance. I have seen a few of these double-digit drawdowns in the stocks as well. They're never fun in the moment, but I think one word that I would use to describe the industry is resilient. So the next 50 minutes or so, we're going to talk about the industry. There's a lot to cover. We'll talk a little bit about the past, a lot about the present, everything going on and kind of where we go from here.

So it's great to have two of the leaders on stage with me today, Marc Lipschultz, Co-CEO of Blue Owl. He founded with a few others, the legacy credit business at Blue Owl, Owl Rock back in 2016. Prior to that, he was a long-time partner at KKR. We have Kipp deVeer from Ares. He is now Co-President of the firm, also a long-time partner. He previously ran ARCC and was Head of Credit. So it's great to have both of you on stage today. There's a lot to cover.

Kipp, maybe to start with you, I'd love to just hear about how the new role is going as Co-President, how your day-to-day has changed a little bit. I'm assuming you're doing a lot of this stuff, seeing investors, et cetera. And then the two co-President announcements at the firm, how does that coincide with just the natural evolution of Ares?

Yes, sure. Well, it's nice to be here. Thanks for having me. So I'm joking around a little. So I was already doing a lot of this. Now the good news is I get to do it with a better title. So I'm joking around. So that helps, particularly in other places not like New York where that matters more. But yes, obviously, I've been with the company for 20 years. So I've kind of been there through the growth and the evolution of everything that we've done.

And I think coming up through the private credit side of the business and then taking over credit actually, I think, in 2016 when you guys were getting started, Marc, we have five businesses on the credit side. So it's two direct lending businesses in the U.S. and in Europe. We have an asset-based finance business. We have our loan and high-yield business, then we have our opportunistic credit business.

So the short answer to your first question is, I kind of worked myself out of a job, which means we have a really, really great, deep talented bench of people in all five of those businesses. So any of the strategic stuff or hiring or just changing of the strategy and the people was really done. So I went to Mike a couple of years ago, and I said, I think there are a lot of other things going on at the firm that are pretty exciting where I could be valuable. And obviously, with the transition with Blair and I getting promoted in February, Blair, just by way of background, my Co-President is based in London, spends a lot of time in the States, was someone I hired to really help drive the growth in the European direct lending business in 2013. If he were here, he'd probably say the same thing. He worked himself out of a job a little bit, too. That's a hugely successful business for us.

So we're both able to spread our wings doing different things. So what the three of us agreed on was we have a couple of things that we're working on, I'd say, at the enterprise level of the firm, things to do with sales and customer-facing things, and there's always operations and technology improvements. So we have our hands dirty in a handful of those things. But then we each, Blair and I took a couple of different things to really lean into. The opportunities that I saw that I'm spending a lot of time on today include everything from our real estate lending business to our infra debt business, which unlike some of our other friend and competitor firms actually don't sit in credit at Ares. They actually sit in our real assets team. So trying to bring a little of what we've done in credit to those two businesses and think about talent and think about maybe additions that we might need to make either to the existing team or new geographies.

And it also coincides quite a bit with what we're doing on the insurance side, which I know is a focus for you. Obviously, there is a desire, I think, for many insurance companies to figure out how to access alternatives in a way that they never have before, and they're in a particularly tough spot with how tight IG spreads are and the way their balance sheet support. So that's a smattering of the things that I'm doing. But it was hard to give up my time in credit. Obviously, it's our largest business and most of the people that are there are folks that we've hired over the last 20 years, but it's a great group of people.

That's great. And then, Marc, looking at the early days of Blue Owl, Owl Rock, going back to 2016, really a direct lending business. Fast forward to today, it's not just direct lending, you have asset-based lending, you have digital infrastructure, GP stakes, et cetera. So, talk about the evolution over the last decade. You've been acquisitive, and it would just be helpful to kind of, from your perspective, think through and walk through just kind of the natural evolution of your business as well.

Sure. Look, it's great to be here, Brian, your understanding of this industry is, I would dare say, unique and with the superstar of the industry is a privilege. So, I -- look, we've come a long ways in 10 years, but I think some things have stayed the same. So maybe I'll start with what's the same, and then we can talk to the evolution.

What's the same was we started the business with a couple of key principles in mind. One was that we wanted to be a capital solutions provider. That is to say the picks and shovels provider to the gold miners, whatever metaphorical example you like. Our job is to provide bespoke solutions to ultimately what's proven to be a wider range of users. But that was the principle first.

And the reason for that, very importantly, number two, was to architect a set of investment strategies for investors that are much more about downside protection, principal preservation, yield, and that's the common thread when you look across the things we do. And while it's many more than it was 10 years ago, they're actually still very much adjacent, and that's the common thread is they're very much about the -- how do I protect capital and make a nice return sort of in that order, if you will. And alts perhaps prior to that, and then I was in alts for 21 years before, mostly had the character of how do I get kind of maximum returns and manage the risk to go with it. So those two.

And then third was the idea of serving the individual investor and the institutional investor as true peers and not as this. I'm an institutional business, and I can, damn, to do business with these individuals. So those are the three premises, and those are consistent. And so I guess, today, I would characterize that as really the DNA of the firm. And then what we've done is where we see opportunities organically or through acquisition to deliver on those promises, that's how we've built the business. The bulk of our growth has been organic, the substantial bulk of our growth.

It's true we've done a number of which we're very happy about, of acquisitions. In a way, the number of acquisitions probably -- I don't say it's misleading, but actually as a percentage of our enterprise, each one was quite small. And then we've taken them and done organic things with them. So if you take our real assets business at the time that we acquired what was then Oak Street at $12.5 billion of assets. And today, I think we're at $45 billion of assets, and that now last year was the largest real estate fund raise in the world, I think. Our continuously offered product in real estate is thriving. That now has over $7 billion of equity in it.

So not to go down this rabbit hole, but the idea being that it's where can we find strategies that deliver on that promise from 10 years ago and are additive to what people want in their portfolios today.

Marc, I'm not going to speak for you, but I'm going to add something on that we talk about a lot, which -- and I think you guys -- knowing you guys as well as we all do know one another and respect one another.

A lot of these businesses actually operate better at scale, and they operate better if you can manage them in a global way, right? So the acquisitions that we've done have been really to add complements to what we started as a credit business. So, it is it's real assets, it's secondaries. It's other things that all of our investors, when we talk to them day-to-day, want to see from a large diversified global firm. And most of them actually view us as better positioned to manage those assets as an integrated manager than as a single strategy manager.

Yes. And one other comment on that because this is a commonality between our firms. That said, there's another version, and this is neither good bad or otherwise, just strategy. Some versions of the alt model are all things to all people. And that's not our model, and I speak -- I think I can speak for Kipp as well. It's not their model. It is about certainly multiple different ways to deliver for investors and to win for our shareholders, but it's not everything. And I think it's -- scale is hugely important in each business and collectively. On the other hand, it's very hard to be good at everything all the time, and you got to know your strengths.

That's great. And I guess sticking on the point of scale, I think a lot of folks that look into the industry from the outside, like they see firms getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and they think it's a bad thing. But to your -- both your points, like scale is critical. Scale creates the outperformance. So maybe just talk through this a little bit more, like from your seat, why is scale so important? And what are the competitive advantages? And really how does scale create differentiated returns for your investors?

Yes. I'm happy to start. So, here's the thing, too, like scale is not a monolithic term. In some worlds and some strategies, scale is decidedly advantageous. In others, it's not.

In credit or the -- I'll call it even generally, these capital solutions products more generally, scale is undoubtedly a uniformly advantageous fact. It's about more origination, more underwriting and ability to participate with the largest companies with their solutions. You want to do a big financing and you're a big company and you're a big sponsor, there's only a few people you're going to call and a couple of us are here. I don't say that with any arrogance. I say that with the benefits of the scalable solutions. And so there's only an advantage to be able to see more credits and see bigger credits and see better ones and then be one of the few people that's positioned to take advantage of them.

That's not true of every strategy, right? Like take the opposite version, which obviously has nothing to do with what we all do. Venture capital is not like, oh, is this uniformly better. If you just raise more and more and more capital and you're bigger and bigger, it's just not true. In fact, evidence would probably be the contrary. So I think it's important to know what fits your model here, take the other side of it, the contra. Like why would you want to be smaller so you can see fewer things so you can lend to smaller companies?

And less information...

Yes, less knowledge, less credit. Honestly, they're just other than the -- what is not accurate, this argument, oh, we get better spreads, better agreements, which is just not true in the smaller market. There's just no advantage. And in fact, you've seen this. That's why today, if you look at the scale participants, again, just pick credit as a discussion, it's the same people that were really big five years ago, just gotten bigger, and that's actually a very rational outcome for this business because it's a better way to do credit.

Anything to add, Kipp?

No.

And I guess just going back to the business models a little bit because I think this is important. 5, 10 years ago, the industry was primarily some private equity funds, some direct lending funds, some liquid credit. Fast forward to today, you have capital-light businesses, you have capital intense, you have on-balance sheet insurance liabilities, you have transaction fees, et cetera. So the models have evolved quite a bit. And I think all -- you and your peers, you're all kind of doing the same thing, but you're going at it at a little bit of a different angle.

But I look at Ares and Blue Owl, both models are capital-light, they're fee-driven, they're FRE-centric. So just walk through -- I don't think it's a coincidence that both of those models are like that. So just walk through why capital-light and why you operate the business that you do. Maybe to start, Kipp.

Yes. I mean I think it's really important you point that out because -- we have a lot of folks that come into our office and start asking us questions about our company that seem like they're better suited for not our company. And you can probably guess at what I mean by that. People have ended up going different directions, I think, based on their own experiences with how those companies got built.

To your question, we've tried to keep it incredibly simple, right? Ares is an asset management firm with strong expertise across a wide variety of alternatives, and to Marc's earlier comment, we don't participate in every portion of the market, but we want to participate in the areas where our investors think we can bring them value and great performance. But at the end of the day, for the folks that are buying our stock, I think they love the fact that we've been able to grow both organically and inorganically with a very simple business model that at the end of the day, I think is quite easy to value other than maybe the last three or four months has proven to be the case.

Yes. I'll just echo that, look, at the end of the day, our businesses, both are highly cash generative. And obviously, we've equally made the selection to give that cash to our shareholders. I guess we don't think that there's anything we're going to do with that capital internal to our balance sheet at scale to be better than smart people in this room can do with that capital.

If that were strategically relevant, look, you can't be Apollo and say I'm going to be in the insurance business, oh, I'm going to be capital light. Now you can serve the insurance industry like we all do. You can have a small insurance business, but that's just a fundamental strategic question. And again, I don't -- it doesn't make one model right or wrong, but you have to know what your model is and build a business that's consistent with that. We build businesses that are all about fee income, fee revenues. Our entire revenue line is fees, entire revenue line. So that's just compatible for us with having a high margin, high cash flow, high dividend stock.

And it kind of goes into my next question. I feel like every period of volatility we get -- I've covered the space, again, 12 years. So it's like every few quarters, you get these periods of volatility. People are very negative on the sector. When I take a step back, I look at my alts coverage collectively, there's $600 billion, $700 billion of dry powder. And so I think some folks forget volatility is actually a good thing for your businesses. And so spreads have been tight. You get some volatility, they gap out, you can deploy capital into higher quality companies, better spreads, et cetera.

So, just from your standpoint, like why is that so relevant? And I think, too, like you go back and look at where the outperformance comes from through the cycle, it's periods of volatility.

I'll take that because that's where I was going to kind of lean in. But we've actually I think, develop real expertise in all the assets that we manage, frankly, in volatile markets, right? We tend to see accelerated growth during periods of volatility. We like that. I was having a meeting before coming over here and not to give me my commercial on where the world is.

But my thinking is actually, if you'd asked me three years ago how you're going to see things with a dramatic monetary tightening cycle and all of that, I would have thought you would have seen slower growth, higher defaults, worse credit performance, et cetera, and we're just not seeing it. So rather than talk about first brands, I'll just leave that there. But I think the problem is that markets -- Marc and I were just talking about this, markets generally feel kind of expensive, particularly here in the U.S. because I think a lot of global investors that we talk to continue to believe, despite all of the negative headlines, people were concerned, not to be political, people were concerned about Trump, then came liberation Day. And now everything has rallied back, say, for maybe the last couple of weeks to be all-time market highs, tight corporate IG spreads, really tight in leveraged finance. And that's in response to the fact that the economy is good and people want to invest here in the U.S.

So I'd be happy if things were a little more volatile in the next year or two because I think we'll succeed as a firm, and I'm sure Marc would say the same thing.

Yes. We -- volatility is fine. And remember, our capital is largely permanent in our -- so we're quite happy with there being today, good luck underwriting a syndicated loan or a bond deal because the market is wild and woolly in terms of trading behavior, not fundamentals, right? Our businesses are doing great. businesses are doing great. Our portfolio is in great shape. But obviously, the market is all now stirred up about this constellation is of fears. And so that's good for us. I mean that means more people come to the private market. It means on the margin, terms are better.

Risk premiums are higher, investing is easier and all of that.

And it reinforces our model. I mean today, like to me, the irony will be the -- now the new one is data center overbuild. People should make as much noise as they want. That would be great because then we'll just all get to do more business with five of the most highly rated biggest market cap companies in the world.

And so on the point of pretty healthy valuations, things have really recovered off of the April lows. I mean you still have capital to deploy, right? And there's a lot of perpetual strategies in the industry that are raising capital on a monthly basis. And so, I guess, where are you leaning in from a risk-reward perspective, right? You have capital coming in and it has to get deployed. And so where -- how do you make sure you're deploying into the right assets, the structure is right and you're getting paid for that risk?

Yes. I mean I think there's value in a lot of asset classes. I'll just say one caveat for us is we actually, I think, have been thoughtful entering the wealth market and raising capital there in terms of open-ended strategies where we really don't want that capital to kind of overwhelm us. As we always say, fighting the inflows of those, i.e., to deploy because you have those inflows can be very dangerous.

So, the firm today, I'm just going to use rough numbers because I'll get them wrong, manages about $600 billion of AUM. And I think our flows through the wealth channel this year will be about $16 billion, $18 billion. So, for us, that's pretty manageable. We don't feel the weight of deployment. The way that you counteract that, and I think Marc said it before, is the scale of your origination teams are key. We have 4,000 people in 50 offices. You find a lot of deal flow when you have 4,000 people in 50 offices. So that's kind of how I'm thinking about that.

But for us, I think unlike maybe some of our friends in the industry, it's a little bit less of a concern. It's something that we're really conscious about being careful about how we grow in that channel.

Got it. And I guess on the flip side of that, kind of going back to periods of volatility because I guess the way the stocks are trading, it feels like we're going into this credit cycle, things are going to get really bad. And so I think -- and I believe I asked it on the ARCC call, but when you look back at periods of volatility, I mean, how much excess return has been generated across some of your strategies?

And again, I think the beauty of the model is not a forced seller, you can lean in during periods of volatility. But like is there any way to quantify that?

One thing that's important, I think, to probably start with is in our world -- and again, we'd be careful because our worlds have lots of different components to them. But for the moment, let's just -- let's talk direct lending, which I think is often where people's focus tends to be coming at the moment.

The -- in a way, it ultimately is a relative product, right, at some level and at some level, an absolute product. The absolute part to your earlier question, we say where to lean in. Actually, even that sort of frame of reference doesn't tend to be what we all do in our core businesses because actually, it is to have a standard of credit that is incredibly high. And that's why we have such durable books, such low loan losses. And that's actually bedrock, right? So what's really happening is deal flow may move around that standard, but the key is to be large enough and disciplined enough to hold the standard. And that means, yes, you'll have some periods where we deploy more, some periods where we deploy less.

So even like kind of the lean-in mindset doesn't exist within the confines of, if you will, maybe a narrow vertical other than to say that with regard to looking for opportunities, key is for us to make sure on the relative basis, we're always commanding a very attractive premium for our investors for being a part of our product relative -- we don't -- none of us live in a bubble would be silly to say it just doesn't matter what the market is.

But if you look practically speaking, over any long period of time in the modern version where we're talking to these kinds of large cap solutions, spreads go up and spreads come down, but they live in a band. I mean there's a spread level where it just doesn't make sense for us to be active lenders. And there's a spread level, by the way, on the other side, where it doesn't make sense for people to be active borrowers. And so if you look, it's just this amplitude and this -- and remember, the portfolios have hundreds and hundreds of names in them. So the portfolios aren't like today's spread. The portfolios have some things from today. They have some things from last year. They'll have some things from next year.

So I think people are getting way too micro focused about this moment in time and kind of missing the bigger picture, which is great, consistent premium with great credit protection that really works through it for investors through thick and thin. And if you're really worried, I'll just leave this, if you're actually worried about private credit performance, then as soon as we leave here, everyone want to like get out of their stocks and get out of their private equity. And I mean, remember, we're the top of the stack, senior secured, like by the time you get to that, if that's where your concern lies, I mean you're skipping a lot of step between here.

That's sort of the big miss. And that we have a lot of the same conversations with many of the same investors. But this -- and look, I've kind of been one of the early players, obviously, in direct lending. So I've heard this story a lot, which has been wrong for the last 20 or 25 years pretty consistently. But Marc is making a really important point, which is there are billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of hard invested equity below the private credit industry as a whole. And I'd also remind people, it's really not an industry as a whole. It's an accumulation of different managers, some who are quite good and some are not.

So I think that manager selection is really important. And with some of the -- let's paint the whole thing with a broad brush coming out. It's just not a really very accurate way to think about analyzing a market or analyzing returns.

But again, just back to longevity in the space, we reported our earnings at Ares, whatever it was a couple of weeks ago, and the results were quite good. And a bunch of the people in our room were like, oh, this is great. We're going to put great numbers up. Stock is going to go up 10%. I'm like stock is not going to go up. you don't think something like a positive...

It was 10%. It...

Positive going to because you catch these moments of sentiment and you can't do anything other than focus on what we've done historically, which is just do your job and generate really good performance and really good results and let the results speak for themselves because if people are looking for things around the corner and we're able to put up four quarters of great future earnings, people are going to feel a lot better. It's keep it simple.

Yes. And kind of transitioning a little bit, but covering the BDCs as well, I have a whole new appreciation for the portfolios, ARCC, OBDC, they're performing incredibly well. And I think people don't understand or fully appreciate the diversification that sits in both of those vehicles, right? The average position size at ARCC is sub-20 basis points. You look at OBDC, I think it's about 40. And then the non-traded, it's somewhere in between. So talk about the diversification of kind of the direct lending portfolios. You have a turn of leverage, LTVs are at 40%, 45%, to your point, the amount of equity cushion that sits in these deals. And because I feel like I have a lot of conversations where it's just educating on some of those dynamics. But when you kind of put all those things together, I mean, what -- how bad could things really get?

So I'm just going to go back to one comment, and then I'll let Marc speak. But just having been CEO of OBDC for 10-ish years or whatever it was, it's actually something that BDC investors don't talk enough about. And you say, oh, you guys have these huge diversified portfolios, which we do, and they don't use a lot of leverage, which they don't. That's not what every player in the space does. You see a lot of direct lending portfolios that have 50 names in them that are levered 3:1.

Back to the scale point.

Totally.

Why would you want a 50-name portfolio?

Totally different potential for outcomes, right? So I think you're complementing us, which is great. But I think we both positioned ourselves appropriately to manage the asset class well.

And I'll just add a piece of math to that. I agree entirely. I think also oddly, when you try to do the stress tests, I think people leap from just -- well, let me just suppose there was some sort of set of problems in the world, which, a, starts with a premise that the data doesn't support today. But it doesn't matter, just, okay, but I'm contingency planning.

The durability of being a highly diversified pool of senior loans with deep equity cushions beneath them, that, in turn, are generating a 10% return. You start doing the math and it actually becomes to use -- use this word, but it becomes impossible in a well-managed, well-diversified portfolio to create the kind of problems people are trying to dream up, right? Like just do some math and go from a world and just simplify it.

Let's just take default rates in respective portfolios like 1%-ish. Multiply by any number you want and reduced recoveries from historic levels of like $0.70, reduce them by anything you want and put that over any reasonable period of time and then compare that to the fact that there's 10% coming in every year. You can't do it. And yet again, the leap just goes from this. I think you always generate a machine into...

Your point on the equity is super important. I was sitting in a BDC meeting a couple of years ago, I think, with our CFO, Scott, who I see back there. And I had somebody who not going to throw under the bus, say let me go through your first lien portfolio. It's 55% or 60% first lien, and let's say the defaults there get to 5% and recoveries in any case. This is a quick analysis. They're like, so then I think your NAV goes down by -- like guys, what happened to the other half of the capital structure invested in equity? Is it all just gone? They're like looking at me, like I'm not. So I'm like, man, this is frustrating.

And that's the opportunity today because I'm looking like clear that our stocks are collectively trading with this bizarre fear factor. that's the opportunity for investors. And I -- one we -- Kipp said, like, look, we just keep executing. We know our businesses are working well. And that's not to be dismissive. We listen, we hear concerns. We all care on the it's not useful for us to just like complain about our lot of life. We have great businesses and they're working well. So we just got to keep doing it and then try our best to clear the signal and the noise.

I think there's also -- and maybe it's true of some participants, but we're talking about how this industry has sort of evolved, and I really very much think that in direct lending, in particular, like the winners are already the winners, and they're not going to change anytime soon because of the advantages that we've built that are very difficult to break down and compete with, right?

But there's sort of this narrative, and it's largely in the press, and I was with Bloomberg a couple of times yesterday, so I said it to them, just joking around. But I'm like there's sort of this narrative that everybody in direct lending is sort of like unwittingly participating in this massive growth of an asset class that we're all like just rowing -- not looking at risks, not being concerned to Marc's point at all. And it's just -- it's a little bit silly because we've kind of set this business up very intentionally over a 20-year period and have demonstrated great results for investors.

So this notion that like, oh, you guys are benefiting from a lack of regulation and the fact that no one wants to do this business except you. It's just -- it's a little bit insulting.

So what do you think changes that perception, the misinformation that I see is incredible. And it's -- part of my job is getting the facts out into the market. I'm bullish on the sector. But it feels like every period of volatility, like there's a new cynical narrative that is coming into the market. 10 years ago, it was private equity marks are garbage, those portfolios are worthless. Then it was the energy, then it was picked and here we are, it's all private credit.

And so I mean, is there -- like is it education? And maybe this is just how the markets will always be, but like does that ever change? And if it does...

I mean I was with one of our friends in the industry who -- I do think that private credit and the BDCs broadly have not done a good job telling our story. And it's not for lack of trying. I can promise you, we've all tried. But whatever we're doing, we're not landing as well as we could. So I think it's on us to sort of say what can we do better?

I come back to what I said before, which is individually and as a firm at Ares, all we can do is keep develop -- is keep showing that really strong result because people pay for performance, right? So I'd come back to that. But I do think it's a good question. There's something that we could and should be doing better than we've been doing for the last 10-plus years. So...

And I also think you kind of break it into two pieces, right? There's the authentic, GI, this is bigger than I understood, and I don't really think I get it. And there, particularly, I think it's our job, no one else's job or fault, like to go out and explain some of the things Brian, you explain to people and that we're all talking about today about the portfolios and what we do and how we do it and the nature of the structure of the industry.

And then there's a group of people that are just -- it's a self-interested set of attacks. And that can be those who compete with us. That can be -- look, negative stories get a lot more clicks than, hey, you know how great Ares is -- like it's just that's just how it is.

It always the last time you bought a magazine, it was like it's sunny and everything is...

Yes...

We're like boring.

That's the world we live in, right? So some of it's intentional, some of it's unintentional, and we'll try to do our best with the unintentional part, I think. And by the way, it has happened over and over. You just talked about this sequence, like where everything trades down now, all the BDCs, all the stocks. And the pattern is kind of obvious. I mean there's a tremendous pull on all these portfolios, all of them that are well done. It's par. That's the pull to par over time when you -- and so you go through these panicky moments and people say, I knew it, time has come. And every time the same thing happens, I predict the exact same thing will happen this time and results will be the real proof in the pudding, and it's -- it will be forthcoming.

But it's true that remember the pandemic, that was going to be the end of it all. That turned out to be a great opportunity actually for private credit, right?

Yes.

Then there was a run on the banks, Silicon Valley Bank. Oh, that was going to be it. No, that's okay. That's fine. There's going to be liberation day. Oh, no wait, no, that's fine. And all you do is keep trying to answer this, well, you never know. like yes, you never -- we could be in a simulation right now. You never know. I mean that's like -- that's a very unhelpful argue.

The other one that gets me is that the asset class has never been tested. I'm like, I don't know, we're managing $80 billion of private debt from our like houses when companies had no revenue and no one could see each other during a pandemic. We ran a public BDC through, I hope, the greatest financial crisis we'll see in our careers on Wall Street, so to speak. So I mean it felt like a test to me.

It was pretty hard. And I always like to say this and someone asked me why I think maybe it was just trying to sound smart. But I mean the Medicis were doing private lending like 600 years ago. Like it really is so not a new idea, but more to be nonfacetious about it. Leverage lending has been an active -- I was doing LBOs when they were called LBOs in '95 using leveraged loans.

Just putting the word private in front of doesn't make them not credit. that is also a very strange mindset to say, yes, but private credit, right? You mean the ones with the better documents and deeper diligence. Okay, you're right. So let's go look at the ones that don't have that and see what they did during the financial crisis. But like some others like forget all that, it's just this imaginary new thing called private credit.

Got it. Another topic, I know you guys are getting a lot of questions about it, software lending. So in this new era of AI, I think there are concerns about the quality of that portfolio. Again, I'm quite familiar with OTF, Blue Owl's tech lending, BDC, ARCC gave some great color on the earnings call on the software portfolio. I mean you look at all direct lending, that sector, those portfolios are probably the highest performing highest quality parts of the portfolio. So why is that? You're getting paid additional incremental spread lending to those types of companies.

So like let's just walk through why that portfolio is performing so well. Are there any -- like how do we, from the outside, think about the risks as AI continues to come into our lives more and more? And kind of just walk through that and what's driving?

Let me go since you guys have OTF, and happy to come on.

Happy to comment. So maybe to your point about the focus on software is because like life loves irony because it is the best performing area in our collective respective portfolios. OTF, which is obviously, therefore, visible and you can look at it line by line, our default rate in OTF is 3, 3 basis points. We've never had a loss on a software loan.

That's why I'm waiting for those.

I mean it is -- and I get -- and then we get to, yes, but what about? Well, what's really happening in the vast preponderance of the software businesses we finance. And again, this is one I'll say never. I'm sure some software company will have a problem. And out of those many, many, many line items, they...

There are a couple of bankruptcies that doesn't endemic.

It happens in every industry we've ever been in. And if anyone tells you they're doing lending, they'll never have a loan problem, you're in the wrong place, right? So -- but what's happening really is to use the current terminology is identification is happening on top of the current software platforms. They have the customers if you pick the right ones. They have the data, they have the moats that go with it. They have the workflow. And very importantly, when you pick industries, not like we just think any software business is a good business. You want someone who has a very large share, controls the data, and very importantly, has a zero tolerance environment.

Our biggest sectors are things like financial service, regulatory, health care. That's not a place where you can say, well, what a penny that the AI in that case happened to have hallucinated your disease. I mean it doesn't work that way. And so...

Sort of I'll interrupt you for one second.

Sure. Go ahead.

Because that's kind of a big miss. We always -- software is not an industry. It's a product, right? And its end markets deliver into a wide variety of, you hope, defensive, not cyclical end markets where their products are really important to these end companies that are probably not experiencing difficulties in a recession. And even if they are for us, I think for you guys, too, this is software they really can't shut off. This is like essential to driving their day-to-day business and the management of that business.

So, and remember, our average loan duration in any of these portfolios is about three years in terms of actual time outstanding. So we're not in three years, right, that all this happens and the software companies aren't paying attention. They are. They did learn a hard lesson, right? The legacy software companies learned a very hard lesson through the SaaS transition, painful lesson. It's not like they're sitting there saying, no, I never saw this movie before. They're saying, I know exactly what this looks like and you all -- many of you invest across sectors. It's not like the software companies are saying, yes, that AI thing, forget that, right? They're all adopting the tools. So I don't know who will win 10 years from now, but that's really quite unimportant to lending portfolio like ours.

Yes, for sure.

And then LTVs of the software portfolio, can you just remind us where those sit today? Because I think that's another important stat. Is it 30%...

Yes, close to 30% in the loan to values in these loans at time -- back to the point, time you do a deal, typically, it's 30-something, 30-ish percent of a software deal, where it's 40-something of a non-software deal. Both are low. But again, if you want over the risk, the fluctuations on it, and it's true that software people got pretty hyped about it in 2021. And maybe this is the growth, maybe this isn't the growth. But if 70% of the capital structure is equity, all of shock absorber is just a question of the equity results and nothing to do with the debt results.

Shifting gears a little bit. So I mean, it's funny. Like people talk about private credit the last few years, five years, like it's really been direct lending, right? And so now we're getting into -- I kind of call it private credit 1.0, 2.0 is all asset-based lending. And really, that's where a lot of the growth is going to be coming from.

So, Kipp, you and Ares have built an incredible alternative credit business really from scratch organically. Just talk a little bit about that strategy, the assets you're acquiring. And it's pretty similar to direct lending in terms of the process and how you underwrite, but where -- what are some of the differences look like just to the regular direct lending?

Yes. I mean I'll -- so I mean, our entry really came out of the great financial crisis. And I mean, because we come from kind of the direct lending background, at least a lot of us, the experience that we had setting up the businesses in direct lending are very similar to the experiences the alternative credit teams have had setting up at Ares, where they basically said, everything I do at a bank, I can't do anymore, right? And it was partially because of regulation. It was partially because the way the banks thought about risk changed.

And what we wanted to do because actually the impetus was investing in other people's CLOs. So that was the first business that we had back to '07, '08, probably managing $2 billion or $3 billion of capital doing that. And we realized that all the other businesses built on securitizations were never going to come back, particularly the middle market securitization. Because if your bank in 2007, if you did a big securitization that you could rate and sell, you sold that to a financial institution, that looked a lot like us, a leveraged loan.

All the middle market stuff that used to sit on principal desks and banks, guess what, never came back. That to us looked like a middle market corporate direct loan just with different underlying. So we went out and started hiring everybody who got fired from 2009 to 2012, and there were a lot of good choices. But we wanted to come at it with people that could really evaluate a multitude of different assets.

And what was happening back then was so and so was like I'm an aircraft leasing guy, I'm going to pop up an aircraft leasing strategy. And we wanted to be very agnostic in terms of what the underlying collateral was because we could move around, and we could really select what we thought was great risk reward.

So I mean our asset-based business today is now about $25 billion of sub-investment-grade money that's looking for a higher return, call it, 10% net at a minimum. And then we do have what some of our friends with big insurance companies talk about, which is the investment-grade substitute business. That's about $25 billion as well. But inherently, all of the business is built on direct origination. And that can mean direct origination to banks, but it can also mean a lot of direct origination in the company. And we're not doing a lot of consumer right now, but it's everything from consumer to hard assets to royalties, really see any pool of underlying assets that pays a coupon that's not a company. And you can lend to that asset, you can buy the entire pool. And the way that you buy those assets as a lender or as an owner expresses your view on where you think the appropriate risk return is and how you want to enter that.

So, it's been for us, I know you guys bought some friends to get into the business who -- they are friends at Ally, we've known a long time. You know this, too, one of the guys that runs our alternative credit was Ivan's partner from the early days.

Yes. I know.

When they had like eight people or whatever it was.

I'm in the lineage.

Which is funny. So they all kind of grow up in the business together. But look, we think the end markets there are enormous. Like direct lending, we don't think the banks are ever going to be able to get back into these businesses. And frankly, the people who work at Ares and at Blue Owl aren't going to want to go back to the banks to run the businesses. So it's been a huge growth business for us. We think it will continue to be.

And adding one feature to that, it has an even higher barrier to entry, which is great, now being the managers for a moment. It has an even higher barrier to entry because someone may very well convince themselves and some LPs like, I'm going to go find the next widget manufacturer. I can figure out how to make a loan to that. You can't say, oh, I'm going to figure out how to make a loan to these 1,000 medical equipment leases. It's a super data-intensive business. And it's evolving the same way where there are bigger people originating portfolios that need a sophisticated durable partner. So it's really quite appealing because the barriers are even...

Well thing that's cool, too, is when you talk to investors just having -- I mean, like when I joined Ares in 2004, we would -- we were $3 billion of AUM, 60 people. So we'd go out and we talk to institutional investors about direct lending. And they're like, that sounds kind of neat, but like we don't know what that means, like we don't understand that, right?

Like we have a fixed income team and we have a private equity team, like where do you guys fit? And we're like, we kind of don't. We kind of fit in the middle. This asset class is the same. There are so many large global investors that understand that there's something exciting here, and they're like in the first inning of scoping out how they want to get exposed, which managers they want to select for mandates, et cetera. So it's -- we think it's a huge opportunity. I know you guys do, too.

Yes. And I guess thinking about like the adoption of private capital solutions, right, started as private equity and then direct lending and then here we are alternative credit, digital infrastructure, and you kind of keep going down the list.

But when you look at the adoption of private capital today, I mean, like where are we across the spectrum? Direct lending is probably a little bit more mature, but you look at some like digital infrastructure and asset-based lending, I mean, like what's the opportunity? I mean, is there a way to think about the TAM there at $50 billion, I'm assuming that could be multiples and even Atalaya, now alternative credit, that could be $12 billion, $13 billion today in three to five years, like what is some of these end markets in terms of your business look like?

Well, a couple of comments just to build on what Kipp said, for sure, on the asset-based side, like let's just take it directionally, cut it how you want, it's a bigger addressable market than direct corporate credit. It doesn't matter if it's a lot bigger, not a lot bigger.

Everyone draws the map a different way and whatever, but I agree with you.

So, let's just start there. So it's a bigger addressable market that has penetration that looks a whole lot like corporate direct lending 10 years ago, a lot like.

Digital infrastructure is obviously emerging at scale in our -- in my wild streams, but I'm going to -- I think I can speak for both of us. I don't think we ever started a business thinking, you know what I'm going to do, I'm going to be a lender to Microsoft. That's what I'm going to do. I mean that was not part of the playbook, but that's what we now do because it's scale solutions with very bespoke attributes with an ability to build an asset they desperately want and need and what a great partner to have.

So the world is getting bigger because it's not going to eliminate -- the public markets are phenomenal for so many things. And this is part of -- if you like to set up this like battle between the publics and the privates. We do something very valuable for a certain set of users. It's a big set of users, which is we have very long-dated solutions, very bespoke solutions, and we're your partner for the long term. And that has real value you'll pay for, for some people, right? And the public markets do some other things. They cut up really high volatility risk that none of us will take in our book into lots of small pieces, that's really good because we're not financing have this really neat idea to build an LNG import facility, like that's not what we do.

So you need both markets to be healthy. But they both have a reason and private markets are just finding part of any market that exists to be a private market solution. In some cases, it will be a big part of the market. In some cases, it might be small, but it's because it works for the investor, it works for us as an asset manager, and it works for the user of the capital.

Just a couple of final questions to wrap. I mean kind of going back to the macro, I mean, Again, another thing dynamic that's underappreciated is the amount of data that sits in both your firms, right, all the different data points. But from a macro perspective, and underlying growth perspective, I mean, what are your firms seeing in terms of revenue growth, EBITDA growth? Maybe some of that has to do with the sectors you're allocating to. But I mean, what is the house view on the macro over the next year -- one to two years?

I think our simple view, I mentioned is the economy is good. You made the point about industry mix. I know we said this on the BDC calls, but our mix of companies should be growing faster than GDP, just that's obviously by design. The BDC has had numbers that have ranged from 8% to 12% over the last six quarters. That's pretty high. My own view is things are slowing a little bit, but it depends really on the direction of rates I personally think rates will stay higher for longer.

Inflation seems like it's more or less under control and away from the lower-end consumer spending is pretty good. The employment picture is pretty good. I don't see a huge need for lower rates. So I think we're in kind of a nice coupon clipping credit actually environment that's quite good for credit.

Well, I mean perfectly said.

Okay. And then maybe just the last question. Let's fast forward, call it, five years outside of maybe a robot asking you guys questions on stage about PIK income, like what...

My robot will answer those questions.

We're getting fed the same answers as we see today. What does the industry look like? Who are the winners? Are the winners of the last decade, the winners of the next 5 to 10 years? Like -- and I guess just thinking about AUM and longer term, like where do we go?

I was going to say it's too hard question. I think you have to go business by business a little bit, right? I mean I made the point about direct lending winners sort of being -- I think that's pretty fully baked. Alternative credit, I think we need to be innovative and think about growth in areas that we can continue to build upon what's clearly an attractive kind of first-mover advantage that we have along with some others.

And I guess the last thing I'd say, and I'll leave it to Marc to conclude. But our investors love the idea of having fewer high-quality alternatives managers, and you made this point, so long as what you're delivering to them is really, really good. And you made the point, and I'd corroborate, which is we don't want to manage assets for clients where we don't think we're at least top five in that market, right? And can you truly be great at everything? Probably not. But to answer your question simply, I think, generally speaking, the folks that are at the top of the industry today will stay there.

Yes, this is the funny other side of the commoditization coin. -- people tend to think it's pejorative to say, yes, but isn't the product kind of getting commoditized. When you're already one of the leaders, that's not a bad fact because you don't need any more. The leaders have been largely established. The one place where I'd say that's still evolving on the margin is in the wealth channel. And by the way, there, though, leadership is really important because you see the top few products, really all the funds flows. And that's sort of being occupied by different ones of us and other firms.

So that maybe still has a little more evolution to go, but I think you have a pretty good guess at who the winners in terms of market share and kind of position as the go-to firm for the most part are going to be.

All right. Great. I think we're a few minutes over. So we'll leave it there. Thank you both for being here. Great perspective, as always, and good luck.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Good morning, and welcome to Blue Owl Capital's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I'd like to advice all parties, this conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Ann Dai, Head of Investor Relations for Blue Owl.

Thanks, operator, and good morning to everyone. Joining me today are Marc Lipschultz, our co-Chief Executive Officer; and Alan Kirshenbaum, our Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind our listeners that remarks made during the call may contain forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future performance or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that are outside the company's -- actual results may differ materially from those forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those described from time to time in Blue Owl Capital's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

We'd also like to remind everyone that we'll refer to non-GAAP measures on the call, which are reconciled to GAAP figures in our earnings presentation, available on the Shareholders section of our website at blueowl.com. Please note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any Blue Owl fund.

This morning, we issued our financial results for the third quarter of 2025, reporting fee-related earnings, or FRE of $0.24 per share and distributable earnings or DE of $0.22 per share. We declared a dividend of $0.225 per share for the third quarter, payable on November 24 for holders of record as of November 10.

During the call today, we'll be referring to the earnings presentation which we posted to our website this morning. So please have that on hand to follow along. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Marc.

Great. Thank you so much, Ann. The results we reported for the third quarter of 2025 reflects strong growth and business performance across an increasingly diversified set of investment platforms. Not only are we beginning to see the benefits of the ongoing investments being made across our institutional and private wealth distribution channels, we have also had early successes in new product expansion efforts. We continue to see a comprehensive shift in how assets are being financed globally. Financing offered by the private market is more and more so, being recognized by borrowers as a compelling solution that offers the ability to execute with certainty and at scale and with terms tailored to the specific counterparty. This is a structural evolution for which Blue Owl is particularly well positioned given our leading franchises and one that we are increasingly able to meet in a cross-asset class fashion as a result of our acquisitions. .

Concurrently, investor focus has continued to shift toward credit and digital infrastructure, which are taking greater market share away from legacy categories. We're seeing this play out broadly across institutional, insurance and private wealth channels and have already strategically positioned Blue Owl to be a beneficiary of these trends. We've skated to where the puck is going and our investors are benefiting from that.

Of course, in any period of meaningful structural change within markets, there's always a concern that some participants may act responsibly resulting in negative outcomes. There have been some headlines over the past months detailing idiosyncratic credit issues, which have led to broader questions about the health of the corporate and asset-backed credit markets. Let me start by saying that Blue Owl has no exposure to tricolor or first branch. And broadly speaking, we do not view the events that have unfolded for those companies as canaries in the coal mine for the health of the private credit markets. However, we do believe that these two situations are reminders that vigilance is required in credit investing.

As we have highlighted in previous earnings calls and continue to call out, the health of our credit portfolio remains excellent with an average annual realized loss of just 13 basis points and no signs of meaningful stress. In direct lending, the modest level of nonaccruals we have seen are not thematic in nature, and there's not been an uptick in our watch list levels. Similarly, in alternative credit, we're not seeing anything that would medicate weakness in consumer credit. In fact, you've heard numerous banks highlight the resilience of their consumer portfolios during recent earnings calls, despite some of the financial press headlines. The reaction that we have seen in public equity markets has not been consistent with the strong fundamental performance we see in our portfolios. And our software loans have remained the best sector farmer with our direct lending portfolio, and we are very pleased with the credit quality and ongoing health of the underlying borrowers there.

Moving on to business performance. During the quarter, we saw over $14 billion of new capital commitments, bringing us to another record last 12-month capital raise of $57 billion, the equivalent of 24% of our assets under management a year ago. This capital raising does not yet reflect any contributions from our acquisitions from which we are anticipating significant growth over the next couple of years. And notably, we have a growing base of AUM not yet paying fees, $28 billion as of the third quarter, which we expect to largely deploy over the next couple of years and drive over $360 million of management fees upon deployment.

In direct lending, we're seeing an uptick in the pipeline for deployment and continue to find high-quality investment opportunities, generally underwriting to a high single-digit unlevered return despite tighter spread dynamics industry-wide. With the risk-free rate expected to end the year below 4% and with leverage loan and high yield currently offering 6% to 7%, we believe our direct lending strategy continues to offer meaningful spread premium and an attractive risk return versus other asset classes.

Gross origination in the third quarter was roughly $11 billion and net deployment increased to $3 billion, bringing last 12-month gross and net originations to $47 billion and $12 billion, respectively. In alternative credit, we continue to demonstrate scale benefits, deploying approximately $5 billion over the last 12 months, primarily focused on small business, equipment leasing, aviation and consumer transactions. This is consistent with our broader asset-backed strategy of financing the Main Street economy. The team continues to make meaningful progress capitalizing on long-standing relationships to deliver for our insurance clients for whom we have originated several billion dollars this year with a robust forward pipeline. And we continue to see the power of the integrated platform more broadly as the alternative credit team works closely with direct lending, real assets and insurance to build focused efforts in areas such as equipment leasing. During the quarter, we announced a forward flow agreement with PayPal, their first partnership with the sort in the U.S.

We thought it would be worth spending a moment on how we structure forward flow agreements to create downside protection for our investors and why they're so compelling. One of the most important elements is the dynamic nature of these agreements, meaning we monitor performance of the portfolio on a daily basis, and we can turn off the flow if the assets are not performing as expected. In addition, our team is focused on partnering with best-in-class originators where we have a high degree of alignment. In other words, the originators are at a minimum owning risk side by side with us through their balance sheets and are often the first loss risk. Finally, these assets are typically shorter lived self-amortizing assets with a duration of 2 years or less. This means that if there is weakness by vintage or originator, it runs off relatively quickly compared to other forms of credit. We underwrite to severely challenged economic conditions. And when we buy our land, our starting point is to assume that credit will get worse. To reiterate my earlier comments, we see no weakness of note.

In real assets, we have continued to execute across a record pipeline of capital demand in the data center space specifically with over $50 billion of investment announced over the past 2 months across two transactions, including $30 billion of capital investment with Meta in Louisiana and over $20 billion of capital investment with Oracle in New Mexico. This is in addition to the previously announced development with Oracle in Abilene, Texas where Blue Owl anchored the financing of approximately $15 billion of project value through Phase 2. We are fortunate to be in the position to offer the scale of capital and deep sector expertise that together make Blue Owl the preferred partner for the hyperscalers representing the forefront of cloud and AI innovation as highlighted by our leadership role in all three of the largest financings in the space.

Across our diversified net lease and digital infrastructure strategies, we have raised more than $15 billion in aggregate capital over the past 2 years, reflecting strong interest from investors for what we are offering. And this only includes $1 billion of the $7 billion digital infrastructure fund we just finished raising. In diversified net lease alone, the $14 billion we have raised over that period compares to $26 billion of total AUM for that strategy 2 years ago. This includes the largest real estate fund raised in 2024, the top real estate products in private wealth on a net capital raise basis, and over $4 billion raised toward our next vintage and associated coinvest.

To add to that, during the third quarter, we announced a substantial strategic partnership with QIA, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds with a shared goal of further scaling and expanding Blue Owl's digital infrastructure business. Extending our progress on this front. Subsequent to quarter end, we launched our digital infrastructure semi-liquid product ahead of schedule and anticipate a first close in December with significant investor interest already observed.

We have built what we think is an outstanding business in private wealth, where we have raised over $16 billion over the last 12 months, more than doubling our fundraising pace from 2 years ago. I believe the strength of our results is indicative of the durable partnerships we've built over time and a long track record of bringing innovative solutions to market. Today, we have an installed base of over 160,000 individual investors in Blue Owl products and are adding highly complementary new products in digital infrastructure and alternative credit to the lineup. We're very excited about the runway for these new initiatives and look forward to providing more detail in the coming quarters.

In GP Stakes, we closed on 2 investments during the third quarter bringing us over 35% invested on our target size for our latest flagship vintage. We also completed our largest strip sales to date selling about 18% of the assets in Fund IV for proceeds of over $2.5 billion, delivering a 3.2x gross return on the assets sold across 2 transactions. As you've seen over the past year, we have been successful in delivering liquidity to the investors in these funds, while introducing innovative path for new investors to participate in the strategy. In total, our GP Stakes flagship funds have distributed more than $5.5 billion over the last 18 months in a market increasingly focused on DPI or distributions to pay situating our funds squarely within the top quartile on this important metric.

And considering the strong results we reported for the third quarter and the ongoing momentum across Blue Owl, we continue to center around a few guiding principles that anchor our accomplishments to date and inform our path forward.

First, performance remains key. If we do right by our investors, growth will follow, and so our focus is always, first and foremost, on delivering exceptional return per unit of risk and protecting the downside. Second, duration of capital is highly important to achieve positive investment outcomes over time. And we have an embedded base of permanent capital that not only supports the investors in our funds, but also creates meaningful visibility in earnings for the investors in our stock. And finally, we are hypervigilant to the notion of complacency. We always look to be skating to where the puck is going, not where it has been. This focus on innovation and being ahead of the curve has brought us to our current position at the intersection of many of the largest secular trends happening across alternatives, and we believe it will continue to serve our investors well going forward. With that, let me turn it to Alan to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Marc, and good morning, everyone. We are very pleased with the results we reported this quarter. marking our 18th consecutive quarter of management fee and FRE growth. Over the last 12 months, management fees increased by 29% and 86% was from permanent capital vehicles. FRE was up 19% and DE was up 15%. We had another very strong quarter of fundraising taking in over $11 billion of equity in the third quarter and nearly $40 billion over the last 12 months, an increase of over 60% from the prior year and another record for Blue Owl. Of that $40 billion, $23 billion or roughly 60% came from institutional clients, reflecting an increase of over 100% versus the prior year period.

And in private wealth, we have gotten off to a great start with two new wealth-focused vehicles with significant interest in our alternative credit interval funds and our new digital infrastructure fund. And we continue to see a growing breadth of interest in our existing product lineup. We highlight the massive secular trends in play for these strategies on Slide 5 of our earnings presentation.

To break down the third quarter fundraising numbers across our strategies and products, in credit, we raised $5.6 billion, a near record quarter for our credit platform. $3 billion was raised in direct lending of which $2.4 billion came from our nontraded BDC, OCIC, and OTIC. The remainder was primarily raised across our newly launched integral funds and other alternative credit funds, various diversified lending funds and SMAs and investment-grade credits.

In Real Assets, we raised $3 billion, $1 billion was raised from Oren with another $1 billion raised with the 7th vintage of our flagship net lease strategy. The remainder was primarily raised in insurance-focused products and co-investors. And in GP Strategic Capital, we raised $2.7 billion with most of this due to the strip sales that Marc referenced earlier. The latest vintage of our large-cap GP stake strategy is now up to $8 billion raised towards our $13 billion goal. And from a forward-looking fund raise perspective here, as we commented on last quarter's call, we expect the fourth quarter fund rate to come in at a similar level for the second and third quarter.

Turning to our platform. In credit, our direct lending strategy gross returns were approximately 3% in the third quarter and 13% over the last 12 months. Weighted average LTV remains in the high 30s across direct lending and in the low 30s specifically in our software lending portfolios. On average, underlying revenue and EBITDA growth across our portfolios was in the high single digits. And as Marc mentioned earlier, credit quality remains very strong.

In light of the most recent 25 basis point rate cut, we wanted to refresh the framework of how a cuts impact Blue Owl and underscore the resiliency of our Part 1 fees. So for every 100 basis points of rate cuts, the impact of Part 1 fees was approximately $60 million or a modest 2% of our third quarter revenues annual. So now with that refresher, first, let's look backwards and then we're going to look forward.

Over the last 12 months, we have grown total direct lending management fees by 18% and Part 1 fees by 12% during a period that included 100 basis points of rate cuts and relatively modest sponsor M&A activity, reflecting the advantages of incumbency and scale in this business. Sitting here today, looking at the forward SOFR curve, which shows approximately 100 basis points of average rate decline in 2026 over 2025 and incorporating our current expectations around fundraising and deployment in direct lending, we anticipate continued growth in Part 1 fees in 2026.

Turning to alternative credit now. Our strategy gross returns were approximately 4% in the third quarter and 16% over the last 12 months. The vast majority of portfolio returns in this strategy have historically been generated by contractual yield and principal recapture with relatively short duration compared to corporate credit. Over the past 2 quarters, we held one of the largest first closes for an interval fund at $850 million and have subsequently raised an additional $150 million to date, bringing us to over $1 billion raised for this new product, an incredibly strong start. We are now onboarding at a number of the major custodians, enabling a broader swath of platform to distribute the product on a continuously offered basis, and we continue to add large distribution platforms for the pipeline for onboarding. And we have deployed the majority of this initial fundraise already by upsizing existing partnerships and transactions as we had more demand for capital than we were able to fill previously.

In Real Assets, you heard about the strength of our data center pipeline for Marc just now. Combining the demand for capital in this area with robust opportunities we see in logistics and manufacturing onshoring, we continue to expect that net lease Fund VI would have committed nearly all of its available capital for investment by year-end. Through September 30, we have deployed roughly 50% of this fund with much of the remainder slated for deployment over the next 12 to 18 months as various build-to-suit projects reach completion. Our net lease pipeline continues to grow with over $50 billion of transaction volume under the letter of intent for a contract to close.

With regards to performance, gross returns in net lease were approximately 4% for the third quarter and 10% over the last 12 months. In GP Strategic Capital, we have now closed on 4 investments to date in the latest vintage of our GP stake strategy. Year-to-date, we have deployed more than $5 billion of equity in our large-cap strategy, slightly above the average annual deployment over the past few years. Performance in these funds remained strong with a net IRR of 22% for Fund III, 34% for Fund IV and 13% for Fund V.

A few items remaining here that I wanted to cover with everyone. First, during the quarter, we saw a fee step down on a portion of the AUM in net lease Fund VI that paid fees on committed capital. This resulted in very modest management fee growth in our Real Assets platform for the third quarter. As we look ahead, we anticipate a meaningful acceleration in management fee growth for real assets given our robust fundraising momentum and the strong pipeline we just discussed with the anticipated mid-single-digit growth for the fourth quarter, quarter-over-quarter, which annualizes to about 20% growth and further acceleration expected into 2026. As a reminder, we have committed 90% of Fund VI to be invested but have only deployed roughly 50% of capital out of that fund, providing visibility into management fee growth as those projects reach completion.

Second, in GP stakes, there was a fee step down for Fund II that is occurring at the end of October and will result in an annual management fee impact of about $22 million. And finally, when we look at our most important key metrics like FRE growth and FRE per share growth, or DE growth and DE per share growth, due to the timing of when shares are issued for each of our acquisitions, shares are issued at close, there can be a natural, very short-term divergence between something like FRE growth and FRE per share growth. So to see the best indicator of our current EPS growth rate, we can look at our quarter-over-quarter growth for, say, 1Q to 2Q '25 or 2Q to 3Q '25. Since we closed our last acquisition at the beginning of January, these are clean quarters, meaning each quarter has full share count and full P&L from all acquisitions. What you see in quarter-over-quarter growth for these recent quarters is a meaningful closing of the gap between FRE and FRE per share as well as an acceleration in FRE per share growth.

So to wrap up, I think you've seen from our business performance that nothing has changed fundamentally across Blue Owl despite the acute reaction we've seen in all stocks over the past month or so. One of the benefits of our model is that we have very high visibility into future earnings given the recurring nature of our revenues, reflecting our very durable business model. Portfolio quality has remained very strong across the board, fundraising has been very robust, and we continue to lean into our incumbency and scale to drive positive outcomes for our shareholders and investors. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Operator, can we please open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Glenn Schorr of Evercore ISI.

Maybe I'm going to try to -- maybe I'll try to just get a summary with your last commentary on the acceleration. So I think I'm okay -- I am okay with some dilution that gets Blue Owl into these key growth markets. And maybe it offsets any pressures from any lower rates and maturation of any of your legacy businesses. So the question I have is, we're trying to solve -- I think we're all trying to solve for the magnitude and the timing of the growth investments when they stop having any dilution and improve the FRE growth, FRE per margin per share growth and the margin. So maybe just big picture, '26 and '27, are we back on track? Do you see 20-plus percent FRE growth, FRE per share matching that? And do we see margin stabilization and improvement from here? Just trying to get to the like the summary of it all because I think that's where you're getting that.

Yes. Thanks, Glenn. I appreciate the question. The answer is yes, across the board. We expect over time to continue to have margin expansion from where we are today as we get into '26, '27 and certainly our 2029 goals. We will expect to see meaningful accretion -- meaningful acceleration, excuse me, of metrics like FRE per share, DE per share as we look '25 to '26, and again, as we look '26 to '27, each of those years builds on each other. We are from everything we see sitting here right on track, with what we call our North Star, our Investor Day goals of 20-plus percent growth for management fees for revenues for 20% growth on metrics like FRE per share.

I'll just add taking the numbers that Alan just said, I take a step back for a moment, the -- and well, to be clear, we understand why people ask questions about acquisitions because this is an industry that hasn't always done them well. But I say this all humility. We've done them phenomenally well. I mean think about where we are and how we've positioned for where the real opportunities going forward are, both for our investors in our funds and for our shareholders. Our position in digital infrastructure is monumental. We have this incredibly successful fund already in asset-backed, and asset backed is growing. So these are capabilities that are fully integrated. And in fact, you've already seen, if you look at the Meta transaction, we had about 100 people working across the firm on that, that never could have been done absent the capabilities that we have built organically and added. And so this sort of recurring -- not your mathematical question because I absolutely understand there's the mathematical reality that if you issue shares and have less than a year of earnings, then I mean, obviously, the per share effect won't show up until you get a year out or if you look at our annualized numbers look quarter-over-quarter in annualizing, you can already see what we're talking about. This isn't a -- we can see it on the come, just look at the quarter-over-quarter numbers annualize and you can see that the acceleration coming back to the levels that we're all anticipating. So from where we sit today, just so everyone knows that those acquisitions are done, dusted and thriving. And we view that as having been no small part of our success. Look at -- let's look at Owl Rent. Owl Rent today is, by far, the leader in that fundraise and net flows in real estate continuous they offered. Our fund, our real estate traditional flagship fund, as you know, we've already raised nearly half of our target fund size just out of the blocks. We've already committed -- I think we're now 90% committed in Fund VI. I mean so we're really thriving, not just in our core businesses that we already had, like direct lending, but these additions. So absolutely, we need to deliver it through to the numbers. That's just math, thankfully. It's not operational. It's not execution. It's not strategic. But that math will show through.

And maybe one other thing to add. When folks are looking for early measures of success, right, it takes years to ramp products, ramp strategies to get a a good level of AUM that we're working off of. When you think of early measures of success, it could take 9 to 12 months to roll out an organic brand new product -- a brand-new strategy within your business. Think about what we've done with our acquisitions. The interval fund was out in market in less than 12 months. OD, which is our digital infrastructure, wealth dedicated product we've talked a lot about here we're going to have our first close in less than 12 months from when we closed the acquisition. So when folks are looking for how much are we going to raise, what's going to happen over time, it takes time. But when you look for those early measures of success, are they on the right track? I couldn't agree more with Marc, we're hitting on all cylinders and things are pointing up into the right for us with all of these acquisitions.

The next question comes from Patrick Davitt with Autonomous Research.

I have a question on retail flows. I guess, through the lens of the volatility in August. It looks like October 1 subscriptions were still quite strong. Do you have any early view on how the credit volatility we've seen the news flow has or has not impacted the numbers we're going to see for November 1.

Thanks, Patrick. Appreciate the question. We're coming off just for credit, just focusing on what we're doing there, but I'm going to pull the lens back a little. Very strong flows. We're coming off of a record quarter in our wealth dedicated products for 3Q. We have continued momentum this month. We should build on what we did last month for products like OCIC. We had a record quarter -- I'm sorry, a record month with ORENT. We broke over $300 million. We are well on our way to one of our goals -- one of our many goals that we're on track with of hitting $1 billion a quarter run rate for ORENT by the end of this year. So we're very encouraged by what we see, and we see a lot of resiliency in the channel for what we've been doing.

ORENT and OCIC, just very particularly the way you phrased it, to be clear, they're accelerating this month, accelerating. So I have to add it to the list of imaginary problems that people are concerned about. And maybe it speaks to this point, sometimes we get this issue of gosh, individual investors, are they more volatile, they're going to be fickle. Actually, the evidence to us is there's certainly does that -- it might be to the contrary that institutions actually can sometimes be much more heard like and can hit odd rigid barriers or someone on their board calls and says, gosh, I read an article. I don't really know. But actually, the evidence we have doesn't suggest that individuals -- in fact, it seems like they're grasping the reality that these strategies are working really, really well, perhaps better than the media and maybe some institutions, although we're doing quite well with institutions now as well.

The next question comes from Brian McKenna with Citizens.

So if I look at all of your public companies, that includes OWL, OBDC, OTF, all three continue to deliver pretty strong results across the board. You look at the underlying fundamentals, they remain some of the best in the industry. And even for your public BDCs, they are really the best in the industry. And then you look at direct lending, gross returns that you reported today, it should be another strong quarter for your BDC. So your fundamentals remain really strong, but you look at all the stocks and they're trading at a pretty meaningful discount to peers. So what do you think is still misunderstood about your businesses within the market today? And what are you doing as a management team to change these perceptions and ultimately get these stock prices higher? And then does there come a point when insiders start to step in and they ultimately start buying some of these stocks.

So as to what investors don't understand, it's probably hard for us to to give you a comprehensive answer in fact, you obviously talked to a lot of investors, we can offer some theories. I can certainly tell you what we're doing. We're doing two things that I think at the end of the day, will solve this problem. One, we are executing, executing, executing. Business is good. Business is continuing to be good. And we're focused on continuing to deliver. We haven't seen an opportunity as good for investors and by extension for Blue Owl as the digital infrastructure investment cycle that we're in. And so we're just going to continue to deliver results for investors and continue to deliver -- frankly, we're short capital in an arena like that. So I think that execution is the name of the game, internal for us and then communication, we are out on the road talking to shareholders all the time. Everyone in the senior team here is, by the way, happy to do it. We like spending time with shareholders and we're out on the road, and we'll answer any question anybody has. So I think we can communicate. We're trying to spend time answering questions as best we can in the media as well. So we're going to communicate and execute. And to what you just said, look to our way of thinking, it couldn't be better set. I mean the reality is we -- in every one of these vehicles they're an incredible value. So rather than complain about it, which I know is a natural tendency we can have, that seems kind of pointless, rather, we're just going to continue to deliver spectacular results. Look at where we are compared to where we were when we set up our Investor Day, we're tracking right along. Look at like RDE this year versus what people thought a year ago and compare that to what the revisions happened with our peers. I mean we're in a different category as we should be because we have a highly predictable fee stream. So I don't know, we'll take advice from anyone on how better to do either of those things or crack the code, but history is a guide, those who join us now, I think, are going to be the beneficiaries of the upside from here, which we think of is substantial.

The next question comes from Craig Siegenthaler with Bank of America.

My question is on the digital infra business. So we've seen these large deals recently, like the $27 billion deal to develop the Hyperion data center. And I'm sorry, I'm losing my voice a little bit here, but I believe the underlying leases have maturities of about 15 to 20 years. So my question is, under what scenarios can Meta terminate or walk away from the lease earlier than 15 years? And if they do that, what compensation would they owe Blue Owl funds? And how would that impact the IRR for Blue Owl LPs on that investment?

Yes. So the leases -- first of all, let's step back. The leases are designed to function for 20-plus years. So just to start to level set to your point. There is a -- it is -- and this is part of the skill and art that both Meta and I think we brought to it. They're designed in a very bespoke way to create elements of flexibility for Meta. Of course, as you know, they're actually -- just yesterday, we're talking about how they're actually rapidly accelerating their spend. So I think this is more about having a flexibility, which I give them full credit for than having anything that's likely to be used. But just to cut through it all and I don't want to lose the forest for the trees. If there were an early termination, there is a perfectly mathematical make whole where we make -- the debt makes all its money. We make a spectacular equity return under every circumstance. So it is really -- it doesn't -- we expect it will end up being a 20-plus year undertaking but it actually -- you call it doesn't matter. If we terminated anywhere along where they have the options to do it, there is a value guarantee on the assets. So we make a great return under any one of those conditions. So there's -- we're happy any which way.

The next question comes from Bill Katz with TD Cowen.

I wish it was a day we could ask more than one. Maybe sticking with the digital story. I was wondering if you could help us understand how quickly you might be able to absorb the most recent flagship fundraising given the size of the pipeline? And then secondarily, despite the strong macro dynamics, the fund performance has been pretty weak 2 quarters in a row. I was wondering if you can help us unpack why that's the case? And would that be a hindrance to drive growth from here?

Yes. Let's first just clear up the accounting, therefore, kind of is -- not your misunderstanding understandable misunderstanding of the return points. So Alan you cover that first and then I'll talk about fund.

Sure. Thanks, Bill. This quarter, we saw some mark-to-market on swaps that we have around debt that's in place. So when we look at this, we see these are very long-term projects. When you look at the underlying performance of the data centers, they are very strong. And I'll tell you, on average, across our digital infrastructure funds, Fund I, II and III, we have IRRs in the high teens. So we're experiencing great IRRs for our investors. This is short-term noise.

Yes. And just to frame that in a way that will be apparent to everyone I'm sure it's already apparent to you. These are very long-dated leases with rent escalators, not to be lost by the way, that escalator is very powerful over time. But to match, we will -- we swap debt in many cases against them. So we've locked in our returns and our returns are outstanding. But as an accounting matter, the swap itself gets marked for accounting purposes unrelated to the fact that really, it's just serving to create this fixed income stream. So that is just an accounting quirk. The -- in terms of the absorption of the Fund, we are heavily committed already through Fund III. And so we will be back with Fund IV in the 2026. And at this point, as I said, we're -- the demand for capital given the partnerships we have and the capabilities we have, vastly exceeds our current capital on hand. So that's a great opportunity for our LPs, or frankly, others that may join us in other strategic roles, take like QIA, who joined us as a strategic partner in our continuously offered product, $1 billion commitment to help anchor that product. And we're going to continue to grow that partnership, a fantastic strategic partner. And they picked this platform because they see the scale and quality of the opportunities. So we're going to continue to develop these both strategic partnerships, and we're already seeing really great fund flows in uptake rates, speeds of adoption we've not seen before in continuously world. So we're trying to gather the capital, but it's still very imbalanced. We need much more than we have to capture what we may think are once-in-generation opportunities.

When you think of the momentum we have here, Bill, if you think about Fund III closed at the end of April, and within 12 or 18 months, we should be out -- and we expect we will be out of our first close, not just marketing, but our first close for Fund IV. And the digital infrastructure wealth product I mentioned a few minutes ago, our plans were to launch that in early 2026. We're ahead of that plan. We have so much momentum. We have two of our biggest distribution partners live in the system. We expect our first close to be December 1, and we are really encouraged by the early signs we're seeing in the channels there.

The next question comes from Benjamin Budish with Barclays.

I wanted to ask about operating leverage in the business. You indicated, I think, earlier in the Q&A that you expect -- you do expect FRE acceleration in the next few years. Curious if I just look at this quarter, you did have a big step-up in credit management fees, I think driven by the listing of OTF, but margins are still sort of that low 57% range. I guess that was presumably embedded into your prior full year guidance. But can you just remind us like why wasn't there more in the quarter? And as we think about the next several years, obviously, a lot going on in the top line and from a fundraising perspective, but how else are you thinking about expanding FRE margins and what that may look like?

There's a reason that we're -- there's a reason that we grow faster and more predictably than anyone in our industry. And there's a reason that we get to strategic places like digital infrastructure and alternative credit. And I want to say that other people are doing a phenomenal job, they are. But there's a reason when you just step back and put the numbers on a piece of paper, we are kind of in a category of our own. And it's because we invest in continuing that track forward. So we will continue, of course, to be a highly profitable business. You continue to see our margin this quarter at 57% plus. Sure, there's some operating leverage in the business over the medium term. But just -- from our point of view, that is not where you make money in our business. We have 30 more basis points of margin and gave up investing in the thing that's going to be the continuation of this accelerated growth 2 years from now, it'd be a really terrible trade. So we don't find the idea of trying to squeeze a $0.01 out of our margin versus invested in the future a worthwhile trade. So yes, there's operating leverage, but you should expect -- you should -- I mean I don't want to tell you what you should want us to do, that's obviously your call, but I would prefer you should want us to continue to invest in this dramatic outperformance over the long term versus trying to optimize the last dollar of margin today. And so that's where we are. We will continue to make growth investments. So I'd rather have you think about us as growing for a very, very long time at a very high margin with the highest fee rate, by the way, which we do have in the industry. But whether we take the last 50 basis points of margin to the bottom line or put it into the business, pun intended, on the margins, you should expect we want to put that in the business, so we continue to outperform so dramatically in North Star, $5 billion of revenue, $3 billion of FRE. That's where we're going. .

The next question comes from Crispin Love with Piper Sandler.

I want to go back to digital infrastructure, definitely had some meaningful announcements recently, the Qatar Investment Authority partnership, the Meta JV. When do you think of upcoming data center opportunities, what type of pipeline are you looking at? Are you able to put a dollar value on that? And then as well as just expected structures for these types of investments, could structures evolve? And then just on the Meta JV, why do you think the JV structure made the most sense for that one?

Yes. It's a wonderful question about the structures because if you look at the three largest data center complexes financings done, which no surprise, I'll note, all three are ours. The -- that each one is a different structure. And I think this is really an important point to understand. In the hundreds and hundreds of billions and to quantify, I don't even quite know how to quantify the pipeline because it's so vast in terms of the number of projects that we've already signed or that we're advanced on or that we're talking about. And remember, the size of each one is just so massive. But in excess of $100 billion for sure in terms of the way we would look at our pipeline. So let's call the pipeline or addressable market for practical purposes kind of infinite. It doesn't really matter. That's not the constraint. And by the way, if I'm sure we all did look at the numbers from yesterday from all the big hyperscalers and the articles in the journal and I was reading the journal, three articles are, I'll talk about one very core theme from Google, from Meta, from Microsoft, dramatic acceleration in capital spending beyond what the big numbers are people already thought and had. And if you actually, I think, talked to a lot of folks, they'd say we're underspending in the opportunity not over. Now I don't want to be in a position and we're not in a position to take that risk. We do things under long-dated contracts with exceptionally high-quality companies where we earn these really, really strong and growing yields. So that's our part. We're the picks and shovels, we're the infrastructure of that part, but with that said, there are multiple structures, and this is part of the strength we can deliver at Blue Owl as I think the reason that we are prevailing in this market is because we can serve as that one-stop shop, depending on what kind of solution you want, and I'm going to just quickly take you through this. If you look at -- if you look at the Abilene, Texas or Stargate project as sometimes referred to, so that project, we're developing in partnership with a fantastic company, Cruso, who recently just announced their own actual financing, which we're a part of, but that really reflects the strategic partnership we have with Cruso. They're outstanding what they do. They've been a pioneer in this business. They have big projects they're working on and we're working together on how we look there in the development business, and we're in the own -- the capital business. It's a wonderful compliment. So in that case, they're the developer, and we're the owner and Oracle is the tenant. So that's one structure. In the case of the Borderplex project, which is now -- and that one, by the way, Phase 1 and 2, that was a $15 billion project. In Borderplex, that's a $22 billion project. In Borderplex, we're the developer. Remember, we have a business called STACK. STACK has about 1,000 people in it. This is another 1 of the -- may or may not be fully understood, but the gigantic barriers to answer here is everyone's happy to own a data center. We just took one of our data centers we had created organically and say we're creating our data centers at 7, 8 cap rates, we just agreed to sell one at a 5.25% cap rate. So everyone would like to own them. The question is, how do you get to own them at 7 and 8 cap rates? Well, you have to have the partnerships and be able to either with Cruso or on your own, in the case of this on our own, develop. So STACK, We have 1,000 people that do design, build, operate. And it's not about what you did today. It's about what you did 2 years ago to position yourself with the right land and the right power and the right to understand into the regulatory frameworks and how to actually get this done because getting it done it matters as much as the capital and we do both. And then the third iteration is Meta. Meta develops and is very good at developing their own data centers. So they're saying, okay, well, I don't need the development, what I need is someone that can deliver $27 billion of capital that understands my business and understands all the nuances that are going to go into developing this project. So our expertise isn't like we need to build it away for them, but rather expertise allows us to structure in partnership with Meta in a way that meets their needs. So they say, oh, yes, like, it's great. We get to work with someone that understands what we're doing. And so Meta is building. that project. So what I like about that just so happens that all 3, you see 3 different all good flavors depending on what the user of the data center wants, and we are positioned to do all 3, and we're happy to do all 3.

The next question comes from Brennan Hawken with BMO. .

I wanted to ask a clarifying question and then one a little bit more forward-looking. So I think Alan, in your prepared remarks, you were talking about the GP Stakes business and then you went into fundraising expectations. So I was a little unsure about whether or not -- I thought those fundraising expectations were firm wide and not narrowly to the GP Stakes business where you expect 4Q to be equal to 2Q and 3Q levels, but just want to confirm that. And then you also highlighted expectations for management fee acceleration in the real asset business. Does that mean that the fee rate step down that we saw this quarter should recover? Or are you going to be seeing strong revenue growth despite the lower fee rate?

Thanks, Brennan. Good question. I appreciate you asking. I'm sorry, I have an opportunity to clarify. On the first question, 4Q similar to 3Q, 2Q, it was a comment out of this prepared remarks, same comments as last quarter, strictly related to sixth vintage of GP Stakes. So that's what I was focused on in that comment, narrowly, not broadly for Owl. And on the real asset side, Yes, the answer is yes. So the fee rate looks lower this quarter. It's a little bit of a mix shift. It's a little bit of a Fund VI fee step down, but the fees for Fund VII haven't really fully kicked in. We've called a little bit of capital, but not that much. And so that's the dynamic you're seeing. We've raised money for ORENT. Fees are coming down a little here because of the Fund VI step down. So it's a very, very modest growth there. You're going to see an acceleration of growth and continued fee expansion for real assets.

The next question comes from Steven Chubak with Wolfe Research.

Marc, can you provide some really helpful detail on the forward flow agreements and your approach to underwriting and structuring these deals, certainly a growing area of focus among investors. And I was hoping to delve a little bit deeper. There's like four subcomponents, I was hoping to unpack. First, if you could talk about the quality of the underlying credits? Second, the amount of subordination you build into these structures. Third is the volume it's expected to produce in a typical quarter. And then the appetite to afford similar agreements. So I know that was quite a bit, but credit quality, subordination, volume and appetite for more partnerships.

Sure. So let us tackle all and they're all good questions. They're all highly salient. These flow partnerships are something we very much like because what we're doing -- again, kind of a theme, no surprise in the Blue Owl system, which is we like to find the people that are best at what they do, work with them in the case of we work with them in the case of, say, a PayPal, by them when it's something that is an internal asset management capability that we need to should have, IPI or Atalaya. So I think the theme you're going to always see is we're looking for best-of-breed, and with -- we are very keenly aware of what we are great at and not great at, or put it another way, when you focus, you tend to be really great at things. There's a reason that we are outperforming for our LPs in almost everything we do, could we focus. We don't have that many strategies. There's a reason we win partnerships that I think many would love to have because we're more focused in a few core areas that really work. And so the flow partnerships are part of that. So let's start with quality. Well, quality, what you see is we're looking -- and this is quite important, too, even with all the noise in the market. We work with prime. We're not in the subprime business. And so we're talking about prime credit quality. That is why you'll see partnerships with people like PayPal or SoFi, who have strong prime flows in what they take in. So that's a logical starting point. So quality very high. We don't play in the edges. We don't do anything meaningful in subprime. We do prime. And then, of course, a lot of it is just business finance, business lease finance and otherwise. So high credit quality by individual credit and then obviously, of course, it gets down to the packaging, the diligence and then to your second point, subordination.

In everything we do in these partnerships, either the person we're partnered with is owning part of the same risk we are owning on their balance sheet or in most cases, subordinated. Now the amount of subordination, I can't really -- I can't give you a numeric answer because obviously, that depends on the exact credit quality, how much, what controls there are and what can go into the box. But important to understand, we're not buying a package of things and saying, well, good luck with that. They're keeping a parallel piece or usually a subordinated piece and the flow agreements, we can shut them off. We're doing daily feeds. This is a very data-intensive business. We're doing daily feeds between them and us. We see everything that's processing. And so these flow rooms can be shut off if there's deterioration around parameters, in which case, they actually run off quite rapidly. One of the beauties of alternative credit and flow arrangements is the duration per package per month is very fast. So in a world of liquidity, if people want liquidity or strategy where you can get to liquidity as an answer to a change in the world or a change in preference, so, this is the best match, which is why we put the interval structure -- interval fund structure here. You got to match structure and strategy if you really want to deliver for investors. And so that's on subordination, there is most often subordination, there's always at least parallel ownership, and there's tremendous day-to-day controls through data and tech integration with these big platforms. Volume. So you've seen some of the announcements we have. Now remember, it's important when we talked about $7 billion, for example. If not, then we put out $7 billion, right? That is going to be deployed over a couple of year period in this sort of running cycle of take receivables and then they get quickly paid down and then you add more receivables. So we could take you through, and we can certainly try to make sure people understand going forward, a bit of like what's the deployment -- peak deployment or deployment pace, but it really gives us what is a lot of visibility and optionality, maybe for lack of a better term, but it's not like we put $7 billion to work in any given moment that divide that over a couple of years, effectively.

And then on doing similar partnerships, absolutely. Again, what we want are the best originators in the world and leverage their capabilities and will be the best capital partner they can have partner of choice. So that marries with a lot of what we do. Same thing we do in the world of direct lending, right? We're not in a private equity business. We don't compete with our borrowers there in the business. They're great at it. They originate, if you will, and then we support their purchases. So we, yes, so absolutely continue to see similar partnerships formed.

The next question comes from Alex Blostein with Goldman Sachs.

Another one for you guys related to credit, and while the three instances that occurred a few weeks ago seemed to be related to fraud and it sounds like there's another one this morning with HPS and kind of those headlines coming out in the last hour or so here. But I guess, as you look at the credit exposures broadly across your platform and acknowledging that those four are like not really related to you guys. And it sounds like it was all related to fraud. But how are you addressing potential fraud risks across the platform? Is there anything differently that you're starting to look at? Is there an extra diligence you're starting to look at throughout the portfolios? And ultimately, will that require any incremental spend if these instances start to kind of percolate throughout the industry?

Yes, thanks. And I think maybe what I take a slight step back and just try to comprehensively address the overall credit theme question and well phrased. So I think it's actually important to level set in one place to begin with, which is credit quality here, our peers and at the banks for that matter, despite some [indiscernible] is very strong, very strong. The -- I'm going to come back to us, but let's just start with the ecosystem in total. It's very healthy. The ecosystem, the credit ecosystem is extremely well capitalized. It's trillions and trillions of dollars, and then you have a problem. And in this case, as you point out, a handful of problems that appear to be rooted in fraud, which is kind of the least relevant indicative issue when it comes to credit quality or systemic problems and yet has garnered extraordinary amounts of attention. Banks do a very good job. Like I don't want this to be misunderstood. We're all part of a common ecosystem. We have a different approach. But take banks like Wells Fargo. They do a phenomenal job. JPMorgan, phenomenal job. These are great institutions, and we work with them all the time. And so I think we should start with -- there's almost like -- I don't know you're all familiar with the Mandela effect. This is like the Mandela effect of finance, which is this just common population collective misimpression of what's going on. And for those who don't there's these like people imagine that the monopoly guy had a monopole, he didn't, or the tail has a black tip, it doesn't. There's just these common misunderstandings and misimaginations, and I can do a list so everyone has one. Fruit the loom doesn't have a cornicopia. So in any case, the point being like somehow by just talking about this enough, people have worked themselves into this imaginary world where there's some big or potential credit problem. And from where we sit now, I'm going to be a little more parochial, there's definitely not. When I now look at our book, performance remains extremely strong. You know we've originated over $150 billion in credit over the last decade, and we're still running at 13 basis point loss rates. And it will be higher than that over time, like that's too low. That's not the right rate. We don't suggest it is or should be. And in any given quarter, we have a company that has its challenges. We've had every -- we'll have it every quarter. We'll have some company has a challenge. We have 400 of them. But the key is to have very few when you have them get a good recovery. And all of that is working, and we are not seeing anything in our portfolio that is thematically problematic. We're not seeing anything that suggests a shift in overall credit quality or yellow lights or anything like it. We're still seeing growth. I'm not trying to be -- like I said, of course, there are going to be companies that get in trouble. We've had them and we will have them. Some our peers and some all the banks that's the nature of being a lender. But the key is, is it thematic, does it suggest anything greater or does it even really matter much to the net result when you talk about such small numbers of defaults with any reason recovery, and the answer is it doesn't. And so I'm not -- by any trying to be dismissive, but I do think like a little bit of a step back because now like this daily rhythm of -- like everyone saying, what this thing, what about that thing? As for the items you mentioned, now let me just tie it back again. Now I'll just be again rather than try to speak so broadly. Actually, the strength of what we do in asset-backed is exactly what you described, the thoroughness with which we tie in with the originators, the quality of the originators, like just like we do in sponsor finance, we care who the partner is. we care who that originator is. And I have to tell you that there's a lot of reasons to think that SoFi and PayPal are really well-run companies that aren't -- I hope god willing, companies like that are not any part of the problems that we're talking about. And so that is part of selection. Then there's how you do it. There are tools that can be deployed and we deploy in this business. You do use third-party servicers. That's a way to have someone else looking. You do field checks. And by the way, if you do field checks in some of these circumstances, you see red flags. If you look at platforms, see red flags. Like it is very, a, a lot of work can be done even to confront fraud and prevent or at least prevent get it into your portfolio. And then once you're in any credit, whether let's forget fraud, let's just talk on deteriorating performance, daily data ties, we have a whole data science team here. This is -- that's why I get asset-backed ought to be done by professionals and asset-backed part of why we acquired one of the best in the business because this is a very different business from what many people in credit do. It does have many, many more line items and flows. So do we do anything new? Well, listen, any time there's a problem anywhere in the financial markets. Of course, our job is to instantly go back and look and say, does this suggest there's anything else we should have been doing or could be doing? And the comforting answer for you will be we went back, we looked and no, there's nothing that would -- that we missed. There's nothing we would change. We think we have fantastic controls. That doesn't mean no one could ever defraud us. Anybody could be defrauded. But I would tell you that, no, we actually looked in, and when we study what did happen and study how we approach it and frankly, what we even knew about maybe were -- having looked at some of these companies over time. No, I think we feel great about how our process works, but we will always be vigilant about it. But again, I think everyone is maybe -- not everyone -- I think we're a little careful of just kind of this, churning and churning and churning. I think the credit system banks and private lenders, I think we're in a really, really healthy place. And the last thing I'll say, if you really -- if someone's looking around for, oh, you know what, there's really some problem in the world of credit, then I would tell you that people should take the flight to quality and get into our BDCs and get into our real estate products, all of which are designed to be defensive and take credit. It's the senior part of the equity capital stack. The last point I'll make it -- I don't mean to on about this, but I know it's a really important topic to the market right now, and I understand that. If you're actually concerned about the broad credit industry, banks, private lenders included, I mean people need to take a pause and think about what that means for their equity books. We are the senior parts of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies. And by the way, many favorably selected by sector, by sponsor, by capital structure. So if you really are watching this problem, we're all collectively turn our attention to in that case, wildly overvalued equity markets, and we ought to have people moving into credit, not out of credit. And that's not my opinion that we have while we've overvalued. I think we actually have a really healthy economy and a really healthy ecosystem. And we'll ask I see it with our portfolio. We continue to see great strength.

The next question comes from Chris Kotowski with Oppenheimer. .

So I'm trying to think about going back to the data center financing space and trying to think about how -- when we see these press reports about financing, how to translate it into what it means for your AUM and fee paying AUM, when, where and how much. So thinking about Hyperion, for example, the reports I saw that you put in about $2.5 billion of equity, there was $27 billion of debt and that the lease terms going to 2049. So three-part question then. One, I assume what's AUM for you is the $2.5 billion, not the $27 billion. Two, I assume that, that $2.5 billion is primarily spoken by VIor by infra III. And as such, it would already be in the fee paying AUM, but it would explain why you're coming back to market so soon? And then thirdly, does this stay fee paying AUM for you until 2049? Or are there step downs before then?

Yes. So a few things, and then Alan and I will cover both parts of this. So our investment in Meta's equity is roughly $3 billion just to use the right number between us. That is deployed by us over time into -- and therefore, to, I think, the point you raised, its commitments today that fund over time, but it's -- there for use of capital. We have several strategies and one of the hallmarks of Blue Owl been this drive to make sure that individual investors and institutions get treated as true peers. And so we have multiple vehicles, depending on how you choose to participate that will have a strategy that will participate in this product. And so while $3 billion is a gigantic number, right? Remember, we have multiple strategies that participate in that. So you said -- you named two of them very much correctly, our net lease product, for sure, is a relevant piece. Our digital infrastructure is the lead horse, if you will, right? This is an example of a digital infrastructure originated product, which, by the way, wouldn't have if we didn't have IPI, which therefore, benefits the net lease fund back to our point, remember, net lease has participated. By the way, net lease is where we originated Oracle. So that can be a benefit for digital infrastructure. So these aren't coincidental combinations. Then and very importantly, we have our ORENT triple net lease product and are now ODEBT, our digital infrastructure trust. And those are the wealth access channels, those participate. So it isn't a matter of -- I wonder if I picked the right firm. It's really did I pick the right firm, and investors picked the right firm. And so we have homes for that. For that equity and it's great equity. So that's really how we approach it. And then just to calls out your point, yes, there will be gaps between the time we commit and the time we deploy. So that does, in part, explain if people are trying to reconcile drawdown to when we'll be back in market, obviously, once we commit to Meta, whether we funded it today or 2 years from now, I mean, you have to have that money on hand. As for assets under management. Well, of course, it depends on the vehicle. But it is the case that within a perpetual product, we're talking about long periods of time, we've got 20-something years. But yes, that asset could just stay there -- could stay there forever. I mean, in that sense of the word, 20-plus years. So we would get paid -- continue that, again, is the beauty of matching capital structure to assets. in our funds, it won't stay forever, right, in our funds, like our real estate funds, we will often buy and then we'll sell at nice premiums, the results. And in fact, that's is kind of a thing we're talking just the other day, actually, like our real estate product. So we want to invest in real estate and you want to make well risk managed returns, you look at our -- we've now fully invested and exited our first 3 real estate funds. And as the 24% net IRR doing business with IG companies. And that has to do with the difference between the running kind of double-digit hold forever kinds of returns to buy -- if you create things at 7 and 8, and if you want to, sell some of them at 5 to 6s, you generate very high IRR. So the beauty is we have the ability to do all of the above. And whoever joins us, they can pick their entry path and participate in these -- this digital transformation.

The next question comes from Brian Bedell with Deutsche Bank.

Maybe just continuing on that line of that question, just extending that to maybe tying it back to some comments you made earlier in the call, Marc, about the supply of capital for digital infrastructure versus the deployment opportunities being very vast over a long period of time. How do you think about sort of the strategy of fundraising to try to match that deployment in the future? I know you have, of course, IPI for coming up, and real estate even still in the market. But as we think -- as you think about that timeline over the next 1 to 2 and even 3 years, in terms of trying to match that demand if you think that's still going to be there. What are the strategies either, either launch new funds or use the retail markets maybe as a more major fundraiser for those projects?

Yes. So look, I think -- what I had mentioned, and I appreciate the question, look, we have great homes for a lot of capital. And by the way, we're open to very creative approaches also on top of what I'm going to describe. But we have four entry points that allow you to participate in this digital transformation depending on exactly what assets you want and what type of structure you want. And that's like, again, this is very driven around meeting our investors where they live. So I'm not going to repeat it at all, but we have our real estate product, as you said, real estate VII in the market. Real Estate VII is a diversified triple-net lease product that owns a variety of different kinds of real estate projects with really strong tenants and 15- and 20-year leases. I think we're running in our product right now of close to an 8 average cap in those real estate products. We have a long history of stability and great results. And that's a great institutional entry into real estate. And in fact, you're doing real estate, I -- it's a little hard for us to say why that wouldn't be the way you'd want to do real estate period with that word stopping there. Now if you want a vertical exposure into the data centers, which is this moment in time generational we think, opportunity. I think by the way, as years to run, again, just go read the headlines, everyone keeps announcing bigger numbers, not smaller numbers, and their mind-bending numbers. Then we have our digital infrastructure business, where once again, we have an unparalleled history. We've done over 100 different data centers. I think today, we have -- already have or are building 10 gigawatts, and I know that's not like an intuitive term. But if you think about a gigawatt is the amount of power that a typical sizable city in America consumes. So when you think about it, we're talking about like right now, we have built or are building 10 cities worth of data center capability. And of course, that's a fraction of the market. So you can participate. And those are both drawdown funds. So if you are comfortable and like that structure, you'll be in a drawdown fund. It obviously, therefore, means it's more about money going in and ultimately cycling back out, but it's drawdown and it has all the positive and negative attributes to that structure. The exact parallel to that is you can participate in ORENT, which is obviously our continuously offered version that allows you to participate in triple-net leased assets. And each one as a slight nuance in the kinds of projects. One is built more for hold and collecting yields. One is built more for sort of that drawdown and ultimate exit, but they're participating in the same origination engine, so you can participate there. And then on the digital infrastructure side, as an individual, if you prefer to have the semi-liquid option where you can get your yields and then come and redeem the capital of redemption on a quarterly basis, then you come into ODIT. So if I put those four together, we have the horizontal real estate solution and the vertical data center solution. We have the drawdown entry point. And continuously offered semi-liquid edgy point. So I think we have everything you need, and we welcome anybody anywhere. QIA is anchoring and coming into the continuously offered product. So I even think this idea that people like an institutional product in we've never described that, but now more than ever, that isn't the right way to think about it. It's about creating structures and matching them to people's preferences, about the kinds of assets and access to capital and holds and the like that they have in mind. So QIA is in ODIT. So that's really how we've laid out our system. We don't have as many products as most people. We won't have as many products as most. We are open, of course, doing SMAs and customized solutions. But we're really trying to make sure we have the right entry points and that they're all scaled. .

And so you think the fundraising for those products can accelerate given the deployment opportunities? I guess that's what sort of the punchline of the overall question was.

Oh, yes, yes, I think we'll see we'll continue to -- our target for Real Estate VII, remember at $7.5 billion, I mean that's triple what it was two funds ago, right? So they are scaling, and scaling frankly an ever better market for us to deploy. Digital infra already was a gigantic step up Fund III from Fund II. We haven't set a target, obviously, for Fund IV yet. So those will scale with then the contingency offered, of course, are the ones that people can really -- they can participate tomorrow in these assets. And of course, that, therefore, is a highly flexible way to introduce capital into this accelerating demand.

I would only add to that, that it's not just the supply that's driving the demand, it's the amazing risk-adjusted returns that we're seeing when we make these investments that are driving the investor today. This is a generational opportunity that we're seeing. And I think that's a big part of what's driving the demand on the investor side.

The next question comes from Wilma Burdis with Raymond James.

This will conclude the Q&A session. I'll turn the call to Marc Lipschultz for closing remarks.

Great. Thank you very much. Look, I think we covered a lot of ground and we are trying to figure out the right way to balance the sort of bigger picture with the results, but I'll tell you that it was a great quarter. We're really happy with -- most importantly, the performance of the products in turn leads to importantly, great performance at the Blue Owl level, bang on track with durability and predictability. We're feeling very good that we skated to where the puck has gone, and we'll continue to do that. We'll always be vigilant. Don't take anything away from the fact that we understand people and we do too. We always are on the lookout, but sitting here today, we love the position and we're quite positive about the future ad for both Blue Owl and our Blue Owl products. So we appreciate your time, and we will keep executing and we'll keep communicating.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.