Assets Under Management (AUM)

Assets Under Management (AUM)

Assets Under Management (or “AUM”) refers to the total market value of investments that an advisor, investment management firm, real estate developer, fund, or other entity that manages invested capital handles on behalf of investor customers. The volume of assets under management varies substantially across the investment management space, from local RIAs who may manage hundreds of thousands of dollars on behalf of a handful of clients, to national and transnational institutional asset managers, such as Blackstone, with over $500 billion in assets under management. Assets under management for any particular entity/customer relationship may also refer to any number of asset classes – from a single type of investment to an entire portfolio. 

In many cases, fee structures are determined by volumes of assets under management: a higher AUM for any particular customer will result in a lower tier of fees. This tends to be the case with mutual funds, roboadvisors, and stock trading platforms. This is not always the case, however. 

Investors may judge quality of an asset manager by total AUM, though assets under management alone are not purely a measure of manager skill – market conditions or asset class dynamics may also factor into total AUM, and historical returns provide a better measure of asset manager quality. Statistics on EquityMultiple’s total assets under management and portfolio performance can be found on our Track Record utility. More information on how EquityMultiple’s Asset Management Team operates as a steward of capital can be found here.

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