Making Cents Sense

For years, the easiest way to explain BlackRock was to call it the world’s largest asset manager. That description is still accurate. It is also becoming less useful. Calling BlackRock an asset manager today is a little like calling Amazon a bookstore. The original business remains visible, important, and enormously profitable, but it no longer captures the machinery being assembled around it. BlackRock does not simply manage portfolios. It supplies exchange-traded funds, risk software, portfolio accounting tools, private-market data, infrastructure investment platforms, private-credit capabilities, and access points connecting retirement savers, financial advisers, insurers, pensions, governments, banks, and corporations. That is not just scale. It is architecture. By the first half of 2026, BlackRock’s assets under management had reportedly reached a record $15.3 trillion. At that size, the familiar debate about whether the company is “too big” almost becomes a distraction. Size is o...

When I first began paying attention to exchange-traded funds, I viewed them as financial plumbing. They were useful, efficient, and not particularly exciting. An ETF allowed me to buy a basket of securities without selecting every stock or bond myself, and that seemed like a sensible improvement over building a portfolio one company at a time. What I did not fully appreciate was that the plumbing would eventually become some of the most valuable infrastructure in global finance. ETFs have moved from the margins of investing to the center of it. They sit in retirement accounts, brokerage portfolios, institutional strategies, model portfolios, robo-advisory platforms, and short-term trading systems. They are used by people investing $50 from a paycheck and institutions moving billions of dollars before lunch. BlackRock, through its iShares franchise, has become one of the clearest beneficiaries of this transformation. By the end of 2025, BlackRock had approximately $14 trillion in total ...