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The Ares Private Markets Fund (APMF) is Ares Management's take on a flexible, institutional-quality private equity investment for individual investors. Built around secondaries, with a strong dose of buyout exposure, APMF aims to provide long-term capital appreciation while avoiding some of the biggest hurdles of traditional private equity funds—like capital calls and decade-long lockups.
So how does Ares' Private Equity evergreen strategy make itself stand out?
1. LP-Led Secondaries as a key strategy
APMF leans heavily into LP-led secondary transactions:
•Most of the fund is invested into secondaries, specifically LP-led secondaries. This means APMF is primarily buying discounted stakes in existing private equity funds from institutional investors looking for liquidity.
•Only a minority is invested in GP-led deals, which means less exposure to continuation vehicles and potentially quicker liquidity due to LP-led focus.
•LP-led secondaries trade at deeper discounts than GP-led transactions, which means better immediate pricing for investors. Also, unlike GP-led deals, where the PE firm selling the assets controls the pricing, LP-led deals rely on open-market price discovery, reducing the risk of overpaying.
2. Quality portfolio
Ares takes a form of high conviction approach to portfolio composition, focusing on a curated book of high-quality secondary acquisitions, with fairly large ticket sizes. Geographically, North America is the main focus, but there is some diversification into Europe, albeit relatively minor. Sectorwise, the portfolio is well-diversified.
The focus on larger, more established secondaries reduces the risk of overpaying for inflated private equity assets.
3. Direct Institutional Access from the Ares Platform
Ares Management manages over $30 billion in secondaries, and APMF directly benefits from this scale and deal flow. Unlike many retail PE funds that operate separately from institutional desks, APMF is plugged into the same sourcing network as Ares' flagship secondaries platform. That means better pricing, faster and continuous deployment, which enables the promise of no capital calls (i.e. investors are fully invested upon subscribing, rather than waiting for drawn-out deployment periods) without diluting returns.
Consider Ares Private Markets Fund?
Ares brings strong risk-adjusted performance thanks to a secondaries-heavy approach.
Fees are in line with competitors and expense ratios are reasonable, although they differ between share classes.
APMF is best suited for accredited investors who:
•Want diversified, quality private equity exposure (especially through secondary / LP-led deals), which brings some probability of stable returns, rather than the ups and downs of a buyout fund.
•Prefer high-quality, institutional-grade assets over a diluted fund-of-funds approach.
•Can handle private equity's illiquidity, in the case that quarterly repurchases should be higher than the 5% cap.
•Want to benefit from Ares' secondaries network.
Final Verdict: A High-Quality, Secondaries-Focused Evergreen Fund
APMF is one of the strongest evergreen PE funds for investors, specifically in the USA, who want private equity exposure, and might be looking into the secondaries sub-segment specifically. Admittedly, strong competitors exist in the secondaries space – a space that is already very advanced in the transition to evergreen products – though the scale and track record of the Ares platform brings additional confidence. You can compare APMF with other private equity funds using Fundscouter's comparison tool.