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