Business Strategy and Outlook
| Greggory Warren, CFA |With wide-moat BlackRock crossing the $10 trillion mark in assets under management at the end of 2021, concerns about the firm being too large to grow have emerged again. We saw this complaint come up when the company had just over $1 trillion in AUM back during the 2008-09 financial crisis, as well as just about every time the firm has passed another trillion-dollar marker during the past decade. While one of our key bear points on BlackRock is that the sheer size and scale of its operations would end up eventually being the biggest impediment to the firm's longer-term growth, we don't believe we are quite there yet.