Nate Walton

Nate Walton is a Partner at Ares Management Corporation and Head of Private Equity within the firm's Secondaries Group. He joined Ares in 2006 and spent much of his career in the firm's flagship Private Equity Group, where he rose to Co-Head before moving to lead private equity within the secondaries platform. He sits on numerous Ares investment committees, including the Secondaries Group's Private Equity, Credit and Infrastructure committees and the Private Equity Group's Energy Opportunities, Extended Value, Corporate Opportunities, and Media & Entertainment committees, and has served on the boards of portfolio companies such as EPIC Midstream Holdings, Salt Creek Midstream, and Verdad Resources Holdings.

Walton's path to private equity is unusual. He graduated from Princeton University in 2001 with a B.A. in Politics, where he was a varsity basketball player and won three Ivy League championships, then played one professional season in France before earning an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. While at Stanford in 2003, he ran as an independent candidate in California's gubernatorial recall election that ultimately elected Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is the son of Basketball Hall of Famer Bill Walton, and grew up between San Diego and the various cities where his father played in the NBA.

At Ares, Walton built a reputation in energy and complex buyout situations — he is credited with orchestrating one of the more successful shale deals of its era, the investment in Texas oil producer Clayton Williams Energy, which generated roughly a billion dollars in gains. He was also involved in Ares' large healthcare-services platform, which includes the firm's $1.45 billion 2017 investment in DuPage Medical Group and holdings such as Aspen Dental Management, CHG Healthcare, and Ob Hospitalist Group.

In his current role, Walton is one of Ares' public voices on the rapidly growing private equity secondaries market, frequently speaking about GP-led continuation vehicles, secondary pricing, and how secondaries deliver liquidity and diversification to institutional investors.

• Leads private equity secondaries at Ares — buying LP stakes in existing funds and, increasingly, backing GP-led continuation vehicles that let a manager hold onto a top-performing asset while giving original LPs the option of liquidity.
• Targets, per his own framing, roughly 2–3x multiple of capital on continuation funds with private-equity-style return targets "closer to 20%."
• Emphasizes diversification and risk control: a single position in a secondary fund typically represents less than 1% of the portfolio, versus the 10–15% concentration common in traditional drawdown PE funds.
• Argues GP-led continuation funds have outperformed buyout strategies in every vintage since 2018 (by ~20% on average), a core part of his pitch for the asset class.
• Historically a hands-on buyout/control investor in energy/midstream, healthcare services, and media & entertainment before concentrating on secondaries.