FINANCIAL REGULATION COURSES
BlackRock Inc. — traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BLK and a component of both the S&P 500 and the S&P 100 indices — is the world's largest asset management firm, managing approximately 14.04 trillion dollars in client assets as of 2025, generating annual revenue of 24.22 billion dollars, and employing approximately 24,900 people across 70 offices in 30 countries serving clients in more than 100 nations.
Founded in 1988 by Larry Fink and seven co-founders, BlackRock began as a fixed income risk management firm focused on institutional clients and grew through a combination of organic expansion and major acquisitions into the dominant force in global asset management — the firm that manages more capital on behalf of investors than any other institution in the history of finance.
For securities industry professionals, BlackRock is most immediately relevant as the manager of the iShares family of exchange-traded funds — the largest ETF platform in the world by assets under management — whose products are listed on the New York Stock Exchange Arca, are widely held by retail and institutional investors whose advisers are FINRA-registered representatives, and are among the most frequently recommended and discussed investment vehicles in the securities industry.
The Founding — Risk Management as the Foundation
Larry Fink was born in Van Nuys, California in 1952 and graduated from UCLA before earning his MBA from UCLA's Anderson School of Management in 1976. He joined First Boston — a major investment bank — where he became one of the pioneers of mortgage-backed securities trading in the late 1970s and early 1980s, building one of Wall Street's most profitable fixed income businesses before a large bet on interest rate movements in 1986 generated hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and effectively ended his tenure at the firm.
The experience of that 1986 loss shaped Fink's conviction that sophisticated risk management — the rigorous quantitative analysis of portfolio exposure to interest rate movements, credit deterioration, and other market factors — was the foundational discipline that should underpin all investment management, not an afterthought to return generation.
In 1988 Fink founded BlackRock with seven co-founders — Robert Kapito, Susan Wagner, Barbara Novick, Bennett Golub, Hugh Frater, Ralph Schlosstein, and Keith Anderson — initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset management business housed within the Blackstone Group, which provided seed capital and office space in exchange for a share of the new firm.
The name BlackRock was chosen to distinguish the new firm from its host — combining the black of Blackstone with rock as a symbol of stability and solidity.
BlackRock separated from Blackstone in 1994 — completing a public offering that established it as an independent firm — and has grown continuously since through a combination of investment performance, client service, and strategic acquisition.
The iShares Acquisition — Becoming the ETF Giant
The single most consequential event in BlackRock's corporate history — and the transaction that established its dominance in the global investment management industry — was its 2009 acquisition of Barclays Global Investors from Barclays PLC for 13.5 billion dollars.
Barclays Global Investors was the world's largest institutional index fund manager and the creator and operator of the iShares exchange-traded fund platform — the largest ETF business in the world by assets under management.
The iShares platform had been established as part of the pioneering ETF work done by Barclays Global Investors beginning in the mid-1990s, building on the ETF structure first introduced by the SPDR S&P 500 ETF in 1993.
The acquisition transformed BlackRock from a major fixed income and risk management firm into the dominant force in global passive investing — giving it control of the iShares platform whose ETFs are listed on the New York Stock Exchange Arca and other national securities exchanges, held by tens of millions of retail and institutional investors worldwide, and recommended daily by FINRA-registered financial advisers and registered investment advisers operating under the fiduciary duty of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940.
As of 2025 the iShares platform encompasses hundreds of ETFs covering virtually every asset class, geography, sector, factor, and investment strategy — from the iShares Core S and P 500 ETF that provides basic large-cap United States equity exposure at minimal cost to specialised iShares ETFs covering emerging market bonds, specific industry sectors, dividend growth strategies, and alternative investment exposures.
Aladdin — The Risk Infrastructure of the Financial System
Beyond its investment management operations, BlackRock operates one of the most consequential pieces of financial market infrastructure in the world — the Aladdin risk management platform that tracks and analyses risk across portfolios managed not only by BlackRock itself but by a significant portion of the global financial system.
Aladdin — Asset Liability Debt and Derivative Investment Network — is an enterprise risk management platform that BlackRock developed internally for its own portfolio management operations and subsequently licensed to institutional clients as a separate commercial business.
Major pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and other asset managers use Aladdin to track their investment portfolios, run stress tests, monitor compliance, and manage risk across complex multi-asset books.
The scale of assets tracked through the Aladdin platform is staggering — estimates suggest that Aladdin tracks risk on portfolios containing tens of trillions of dollars in assets across hundreds of institutional clients worldwide.
This concentration of financial system risk monitoring within a single privately operated platform has been noted by regulators and academics as a potential source of systemic risk — if Aladdin were to experience a significant technical failure or produce systematically incorrect risk signals, the consequences for the institutions and investors relying on it could be substantial.
BlackRock's Regulatory Framework
BlackRock Inc. is a publicly traded company registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission — filing annual reports on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q as a reporting company under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, with its shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BLK.
BlackRock's registered investment adviser subsidiaries — including BlackRock Advisors LLC and BlackRock Fund Advisors — are registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, subject to the fiduciary duty of care and loyalty that applies to all registered investment advisers and to the SEC's examination and oversight authority over their investment advisory operations.
BlackRock's broker-dealer subsidiary — BlackRock Investments LLC — is a registered broker-dealer and FINRA member firm, subject to FINRA's rules governing the conduct of broker-dealers including the suitability and Regulation Best Interest standards applicable to recommendations made to retail customers.
The iShares ETFs managed by BlackRock are registered as investment companies under the Investment Company Act of 1940 — subject to the SEC's comprehensive regulatory framework for registered investment companies including disclosure requirements, governance standards, and the daily portfolio holdings disclosure requirements applicable to exchange-traded funds under SEC Rule 6c-11.
BlackRock in the Securities Examination Context
BlackRock and its iShares ETFs appear throughout the securities licensing examination curriculum as the most significant real-world examples of the exchange-traded fund structure tested extensively on the Series 65 examination.
The creation and redemption mechanism that keeps ETF prices aligned with their underlying net asset value — the arbitrage process performed by authorised participants described in the Exchange Traded Fund entry of this dictionary — is the operational mechanism through which iShares ETFs maintain their pricing efficiency on the New York Stock Exchange Arca.
The Investment Company Act of 1940 framework under which all iShares ETFs are registered is the same regulatory framework tested in the Investment Company Act entry of this dictionary. The fiduciary duty applicable to BlackRock's registered investment adviser subsidiaries is the same duty tested in the Registered Investment Adviser and Fiduciary entries.
Investment advisers who recommend iShares ETFs to clients — as many do given their low costs, tax efficiency, and liquidity — are exercising the care obligation of Regulation Best Interest and the fiduciary duty of the Investment Advisers Act in selecting among reasonably available alternatives, evaluating expense ratios, tracking error, liquidity, and the fit between the ETF's exposure and the client's investment objectives and risk tolerance.
