The new push, which is being overseen by Mark Wiseman, a top executive at Canada’s top pension fund whom Mr. Fink hired last year
to revamp his equity business, highlights strategies in which a portfolio manager makes big bets on a select group of stocks.
While the assets of the firm’s actively managed stock funds have shrunk to $201 billion today from $208 billion
in 2009, the business is still very profitable for BlackRock, representing 16 percent of total revenue.
Mr. Fink has always professed to be agnostic as to whether a client bought a no-frills exchange-traded fund
tracking low volatility stocks or an expensive mutual fund investing in small United States companies.
In sum, Mr. Fink has become convinced that BlackRock must bet big on the power of machines, be it Aladdin,
the firm’s risk management platform, robo-advisers, big data or even artificial intelligence.
From the moment Laurence D. Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, created the largest fund company in the world
by snapping up the exchange-traded fund business from Barclays in 2009, he has faced a thorny challenge.
Left unsaid, however, has been the reality that at his root Mr. Fink is now a true believer in systematic investing styles
that favor algorithms, science and data-reliant models over the stock picking smarts of individual portfolio managers.
Since 2012, $27.5 billion has left BlackRock actively managed mutual funds, per Morningstar data.
Still, there is no mistaking the larger message: Expensive, actively managed funds looking
to make a mark picking United States stocks must adapt to the new realities at BlackRock.
