By: Bloomberg
Oct 24, 2020
Almost half of BlackRock Inc.’s institutional clients plan to increase their allocation to private asset classes, said Mark Wiseman, the firm’s global head of active equities.
“This is profound,” Wiseman said Thursday at the C4K Investors Conference in Toronto. “We’ve never seen numbers like this before.” Wiseman said the firm conducted a survey of such clients, who represented $9 trillion in assets.
With public markets becoming so efficient it has become difficult to produce returns in excess of market gains, so institutional investors are looking to private markets to generate alpha, he said.
BlackRock is working to expand its range of offerings beyond indexed products, which still accounts for about two-thirds of the money manager’s assets under management. The New York-based firm, which oversees $6.9 trillion, has been trying to move into alternative investments that include private equity, hedge funds, commodities and real-estate.