Machine learning

19 April 2017 By Tom Buerkle

The manager of $5.4 trln of assets boosted its top line and margins in the first quarter even as new cash flowed mostly into its low-cost ETF products. Larry Fink’s shop has the scale and capacity for reinvention – like ditching human stockpickers – to stay ahead of the curve.

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BlackRock on April 19 reported net income of $862 million in the first quarter of 2017, up 31 percent from the same period a year earlier. At $5.23 a share, earnings beat analysts’ consensus estimate of $4.89. Revenue increased 8 percent in the period, to $2.8 billion.

The firm had $80 billion of long-term asset inflows in the quarter, compared with $88 billion in the preceding three months and $36 billion in the same period a year earlier. The firm’s iShares exchange-traded funds business garnered $64 billion of the inflows in the latest quarter.

The company said on March 28 that it was revamping its actively managed funds, including cutting some jobs and relying more on computers to pick stocks.

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