Fifth Street Asset Management Files for IPO

Alternative asset manager Fifth Street Asset Management Inc filed with the U.S. regulators for an initial public offering of Class A common stock.

Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs were among the major underwriters for the IPO, the Greenwich, Connecticut-based company told the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission in a preliminary prospectus on Monday.

Fifth Street Asset Management, which managed more than $5.6 billion of assets as of June 30, intends to list its common stock on the Nasdaq under the symbol "FSAM."

The filing did not reveal how many shares the company planned to sell or their expected price.

About 95% of Fifth Street Asset Management's managed assets are in publicly traded business development companies, or BDCs, consisting of Fifth Street Finance Corp and Fifth Street Senior Floating Rate Corp. The BDCs accounted for about 99% of the company's revenue for the year ended December.

BDCs lend to young, thinly traded and often distressed companies that have credit ratings in the "junk" status. They must pass through at least 90% of their profit to shareholders.

Fifth Street Management Group's net income rose about 16% to $23.5 million for the six months ended June 30 while revenue rose about 44% to $47.0 million.

The filing included a nominal fundraising target of about $200 million.

Shares of Ares Management LP, which went public in May, trade about 5% below their IPO price of $19. Ares Management runs Ares Capital Corp and was the first U.S. private equity firm to go public in about two years.

The amount of money a company says it plans to raise in its first IPO filings is used to calculate registration fees. The final size of the IPO could be different.