Glaucus, page-77

This comment suggests you don't understand how institutional capital management works.

What happens is that the investor commits to the manager a certain amount to a given strategy. The manager progressively draws that committed capital over time - as you could appreciate, it'd be rather hard for a manager to, say, spend a $200m commitment immediately. Once the manager has drawn/deployed the capital, the manager then starts charging the asset management/base fee; when the capital is merely committed but not yet drawn, the manager may either be charging the investor no fees or may only be charging a much smaller fee. Therefore, fee earning AUM, as distinct from total AUM, is the AUM on which BLA is charging fees, i.e. it excludes undeployed but committed capital. Therefore, "fee earning AUM" is actually the more conservative metric.

For a little extra understanding on why BLA is seemingly so good at providing and then exceeding forward targets for fee-earning AUM - that's because they've likely already got most of that capital committed and all they have to do is deploy it. For example, at the moment they have $3.9bn fee-earning AUM, and they're saying they'll have $4.25-$4.75bn at 30/6/18 - the reason they can give those forecasts with confidence is precisely because most of the delta (>$300m) is likely already committed, and all BLA have to do is buy some assets (deploy the capital). In the life cycle of asset managers, the hard part is raising the capital (i.e. getting capital committed), whereas deploying it generally is the easier part.