Investment Management Associate, Ares Management

>> Hi. I'm Sean Andrews, and I'm an Associate at Ares Management here in Los Angeles. Yeah, it's an investment management firm. We have a Capitol Markets Division, a Private Equity/Private Debt. And I've been there for little over a year, coming up on a year and a half. And I do a variety of things for them, mainly valuation. I value like different securities that the company holds, trying to help the portfolio managers kind of have an idea of like how much they're worth and, you know, what they would sell at out there in the market. You know, we're mainly fixed income securities, so bonds, loans, CLOs, pretty much anything. I mean, we're a pretty well-diversified company. There's a lot of different ways you can value a security. It really just depends. I mean, it could be a model that either I created or even that somebody else has created, maybe just for viewing it, to look at what the inputs are, challenge, you know, the assumptions in that model and, you know, get an idea of like, you know, why -- what kind of thinking went into it. And I think that's one of the really important things, is just, you know, how people really challenge each other and then, you know, their thought process. And there's a lot of other ways that, you know, you could go about valuation, beyond just, you know, creating models. I mean, you could, you know, go out there in the market to brokers to see what they're currently selling the bond at, or you could even -- you could do a lot of different things, really. The information eventually is going to flow to the front office and the portfolio managers who are ultimately the ones making the investment decisions. I mean, so the information can go to them in the form of a -- like a spreadsheet, detailing what the model entails. It could be a -- just an email, like that has a little memo, explaining -- I guess, it would be qualitatively -- like what the assumptions and what went into the valuation.