The stock market is greeting the initial public offering of Ares Management, a private equity and debt investing firm, with a shrug.
Shares of Ares opened on Friday at $18.15 on the New York Stock Exchange, 4.5 percent below the I.P.O. price. The stock is trading under the ticker symbol ARES.
The offering had a lackluster start on Thursday evening, when the shares were priced at $19 each, below an expected range of $21 to $23. A major shareholder, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, which had planned to sell shares, ultimately decided against it.
In going public, Ares is heading down a path blazed by some of the giants of private equity, including the Blackstone Group, the Carlyle Group, Apollo Global Management and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.
But Ares’s debut comes during a choppy period for the I.P.O. market. An exchange-traded fund created by Renaissance Capital that tracks the performance of recent I.P.O.s was down almost 2 percent this year through Thursday.
Perhaps more important, investors appear to be feeling skittish toward publicly traded private-equity firms. Shares of Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle and K.K.R., which all rose significantly in 2013, are in the red so far this year. Two firms closer to Ares in size, Oaktree Capital Management and the Fortress Investment Group, are also down this year.
Ares, based in Los Angeles, was founded in 1997 by executives of Apollo, a buyout and debt specialist to which Ares is often compared. Ares grew rapidly after spinning out from Apollo, building up businesses in direct lending and real estate. Its chief executive and co-founder, Antony P. Ressler, holds a stake worth about $1.2 billion based on the I.P.O. price.
The firm tends to fly under the radar. In a rare headline-grabbing deal, it teamed with a Canadian pension plan in September to buy the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus for $6 billion.
Its offering is being led by JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.