BlackRock Has 8 Trillion Reasons for Fund Euphoria
Three recent events in fund management reinforce the argument that only the biggest will thrive.
The biggest beast of them all.
Photographer: Erik McGregor/LightRocketBlackRock Inc., the biggest beast in the fund management forest, on Tuesday announced that it grew its assets under management by 12% to $7.81 trillion in the third quarter from a year earlier. In normal times, that would be a staggering achievement; coming in the middle of a pandemic, it’s astonishing. It highlights the advantage that scale brings in winning new business and retaining existing clients in the arena of managing other people’s money.
It’s one of a trio of recent developments that reinforce the growing schism between the haves and the have-not-enoughs in the fund management industry. This week’s announcement that Fidelity Investments plans to hire 4,000 new staff in the next six months is further evidence that size matters more than just about everything else, as is Morgan Stanley’s $7 billion purchase last week of Eaton Vance Corp. to gain its $500 billion of assets.