Ares Strategic Income Fund (ASIF): Cox Bids $23.15, 13% Under NAV, While Tenders Pay 38%

Cox Capital's offer: $23.15 for all of it, or NAV for 38% of it

On October 2, 2026 ASIF filed a Form 8-K saying that it "recently became aware of an unsolicited mini-tender offer by Cox Capital Partners." The terms, as the fund states them:

A mini-tender is an offer for less than 5% of a company's shares; it does not have to be filed with the SEC, so Cox's own offer document, with its expiration date and conditions, is not on EDGAR. The SEC's investor guidance warns that such offers "typically do not provide the same disclosure and procedural protections" as larger tender offers (SEC, Mini-Tender Offers: Tips for Investors). The board's 8-K says holders who already tendered "should consider withdrawing them prior to the expiration of Cox's offer."

What the two routes pay, for a holder of 1,000 Class I shares (our arithmetic, on filed numbers):

• Cox, if it buys all 1,000: $23,150, once. That is $3,590 less than the same shares at the August NAV ($26,740), a cost of 13.4%.
• The fund's tender, if the September proration repeats: about 382 shares bought at NAV in each quarterly offer, with the rest still invested. At 38.2% a quarter, a holder who tenders everything every quarter has sold about 62% after two offers, 76% after three and 85% after four. The shares still waiting keep receiving the $0.2143 monthly distribution, which is $2.57 a share a year, or 9.6% of NAV.
• The break-even, in plain terms: the $3.59-a-share discount equals about 17 months of distributions. Taking Cox's price only comes out ahead if NAV falls by more than that discount, net of the distributions received, before the holder can get out through the fund. Over the 20 months to August 2026, ASIF's NAV went from $27.61 to $26.74, down 3.2%.

None of this predicts the next proration, which depends on how many holders tender, and the board can resize or suspend the fund's tender. Shares held under a year also bear the fund's early repurchase deduction in the fund's tender, which Cox's price does not. The boards of other funds Cox bid for this year spell out what the ASIF 8-K leaves implicit: the bidder buys at a discount and can then tender into the fund's own program at NAV. Every Cox bid that reached SEC filings in 2026, from SREIT to Blackstone's BCRED, is in our record of Cox Capital Partners' offers.

What the fund is, in one paragraph

ASIF is Ares Management's non-traded business development company: a fund that makes senior loans to private, mostly sponsor-backed U.S. companies and sells its shares continuously at NAV to wealth-management clients. It opened in December 2022 at $25.00 a share, reached about $10.8 billion of NAV by late 2025, and at August 31, 2026 held 810 portfolio companies worth about $21.8 billion, 77.2% in first-lien loans and 92% floating-rate, per the September 22, 2026 8-K. There is no public market for the shares. The only way out is the quarterly tender offer, which the fund sizes at up to 5% of shares outstanding.

Eight quarters of tenders

Each row is the final Schedule TO-I/A the fund filed for that offer. For March and June 2026 the fund filed a corrected final amendment weeks later, citing "a third-party administrative error"; the corrected figures are used here and both versions are in the CSV.

The break is December 2025. Requests that quarter were about seven times the September figure, and the fund met all of them only because the tender rules let an issuer buy up to an additional 2% of its shares without extending the offer — the final amendment says it accepted 100% "as permitted by Rule 13e-4(f)(1)." From March 2026 it stopped doing that and paid pro rata, with an "odd lot" priority for holders of fewer than 100 shares in June and September, and, per the September amendment, no priority for repurchase requests in the case of death or disability.

The September offer closed that way: per the final amendment filed September 25, the fund bought 19,264,139 shares and paid $515,097,753 (NAV of $26.74, less the early repurchase deduction where it applied), and 31,136,186 shares that asked to leave are still in the fund (our arithmetic).

Why the queue is not going away: money in

A fund like this can pay 5% a quarter without shrinking as long as new money comes in faster. That is what stopped. The fund publishes, in each monthly 8-K, the cumulative amount it has raised in its registered offering and private placements; the change between two consecutive 8-Ks is what came in that month (excluding reinvested distributions).

The June 30, 2026 Form 10-Q gives the same picture from the other side: proceeds from shares sold in the April-June 2026 quarter were $224.9 million across the three classes, against $1,021.1 million in the same quarter of 2025. The single strongest month in the series was the August 2025 8-K, which added $1,034.9 million; the September 2026 8-K added $44.8 million. The unregistered Class I sale reported in that 8-K was 297,543 shares for $8.0 million.

Two consequences follow, both in the filings. First, leverage rose: debt-to-equity was 0.76x at May 31, 2025 and 1.19x at June 30, 2026, easing to 1.15x at August 31 with about $4.1 billion still undrawn under its credit facilities. Second, the fund is shrinking: aggregate NAV was about $10.8 billion at the end of May 2026 and about $10.4 billion at the end of August.

NAV: $27.61 to $26.74

NAV per share is down 3.2% from December 2024 (our arithmetic), most of it in January and February 2026. In the first six months of 2026 the fund recorded $294.4 million of net unrealized losses on its portfolio, per the 10-Q. The fund's own performance figure is still strong — a 9.97% annualized total return for Class I since inception, per the September 8-K — because the monthly distribution more than offsets a slow NAV drift.

The distribution has not moved

The gross monthly distribution is $0.21430 per share for every class, the same figure in the 8-Ks of June 2025, January 2026, May 2026 and September 2026, and it is declared through December 2026. Class S and D holders receive it less their servicing fees ($0.1956 and $0.2088 net in September 2026). In the first half of 2026, net investment income was $493.0 million and distributions were $498.3 million — 98.9% coverage (our arithmetic from the 10-Q). This is the difference from Oaktree Strategic Credit Fund, which cut twice to bring its payout down to its income: ASIF's income still roughly pays for its distribution. What it cannot pay for is everyone who wants out at once.

Credit quality, as reported, is not driving the exits. Loans on non-accrual were 0.3% of investments at amortized cost (0.2% at fair value) at June 30, 2026, against none at December 31, 2025. The largest industry exposure is software and services at 21.3% of fair value at August 31, 2026.

One governance detail that fits the picture: the 2026 annual meeting was adjourned twice for lack of quorum, on June 24 and July 22, 2026, and the fund does not expect to reconvene it (8-K of July 24, 2026). Trustees serve until the 2027 meeting.

What a holder can do with this

• If you tendered in September: 38.2% of your request was bought at the August 31 NAV of $26.74 per share, less any early repurchase deduction that applies to shares held under a year, and paid on or about September 25. The rest stays invested and keeps receiving the distribution.
• If you are deciding for the next offer: in each of the last three quarters requests were 2.3 to 2.9 times what the fund would buy (our arithmetic). Tendering more than you need, expecting proration, is common in prorated funds and makes the queue look longer than the real demand; it also means the percentage you receive depends on what everyone else does.
• What would change the math: new money recovering toward the 2025 pace, the board raising the offer above 5%, or the flow of requests easing. The September request (50.4 million shares) was smaller than June's (56.9 million) — the first quarterly decline since the queue began.
• What to read: the November tender offer document, and the monthly 8-K with the NAV and cumulative capital raised.

Other funds, same quarter: the private credit redemptions tracker lays out twelve funds' latest offers side by side, and North Haven PIF, GCRED and Carlyle's interval fund each have their own series.

FAQ

All figures are from the filings cited, read on EDGAR on September 25, 2026; the two Cox Capital offers are from the fund's Form 8-Ks of July 21 and October 2, 2026, read on October 3; the September 2026 tender result is from the final Schedule TO-I/A filed September 25 and read on September 26. New capital by quarter is our arithmetic from the cumulative totals in the fund's monthly 8-Ks. This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.