BlackRock, Inc. is a publicly owned investment manager. The firm primarily provides its services to institutional, intermediary, and individual investors including corporate, public, union, and industry pension plans, insurance companies, third-party mutual funds, endowments, public institutions, governments, foundations, charities, sovereign wealth funds, corporations, official institutions, and banks. It also provides global risk management and advisory services. The firm manages separate client-focused equity, fixed income, and balanced portfolios. It also launches and manages open-end and closed-end mutual funds, offshore funds, unit trusts, and alternative investment vehicles including structured funds. The firm launches equity, fixed income, balanced, and real estate mutual funds. It also launches equity, fixed income, balanced, currency, commodity, and multi-asset exchange traded funds. The firm also launches and manages hedge funds. It invests in the public equity, fixed income, real estate, currency, commodity, and alternative markets across the globe. The firm primarily invests in growth and value stocks of small-cap, mid-cap, SMID-cap, large-cap, and multi-cap companies. It also invests in dividend-paying equity securities. The firm invests in investment grade municipal securities, government securities including securities issued or guaranteed by a government or a government agency or instrumentality, corporate bonds, and asset-backed and mortgage-backed securities. It employs fundamental and quantitative analysis with a focus on bottom-up and top-down approach to make its investments. The firm employs liquidity, asset allocation, balanced, real estate, and alternative strategies to make its investments. In real estate sector, it seeks to invest in Poland and Germany. The firm benchmarks the performance of its portfolios against various S&P, Russell, Barclays, MSCI, Citigroup, and Merrill Lynch indices. BlackRock, Inc. was founded in 1988 and is based in New York City with additional offices in Boston, Massachusetts; London, United Kingdom; Gurgaon, India; Hong Kong; Greenwich, Connecticut; Princeton, New Jersey; Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Sydney, Australia; Taipei, Taiwan; Singapore; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Washington, District of Columbia; Toronto, Canada; Wilmington, Delaware; and San Francisco, California. The company is publicly listed on NYSE under the ticker “BLK”.
Our considerations
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, with an incredible AUM of over $10 trillion, a number that puts the company well ahead of its main competitor, Vanguard, whose AUM is just $8.2 trillion. The company is incredibly broad, serving institutional and retail clients in more than 100 countries around the world.
Further, the company is the global leader in passive investments, with its iShares ETFs, characterized by incredible tracking precision and minimal fees. Indeed, BlackRock’s iShares ETFs account for two thirds of total AUM, and currently have the highest market share of any ETFs, both in the United States and globally. As investors increasingly use ETFs to efficiently allocate capital, access liquidity and manage risk, BlackRock’s ETFs attracted $56 billion of net inflows in the first quarter of 2022 alone.
Even though the U.S. is the largest market for the company, around one third of BlackRock’s AUM is coming from abroad. Furthermore, the company diversifies also in the kind of product they invest in: indeed, while more than half of the AUM is in strategies involving equities, there is significant amounts invested in fixed income, multi-asset funds, money market funds, and alternative assets. It’s clear, then, that no matter where the cycles will lead investors, BlackRock will be able to offer them its products.
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