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Stephen Cohen

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64

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2025-12-12

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2025-12-12

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1

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1. “I think one thing it does lend itself to, and it sounds a bit strange for somebody who started out, you know, on a bond trading floor doing bond maths, is you realize over time only when you look back, the power of compounding. I know everyone writes about compounding and you learn about it, obviously. But it's only when you have been around for a while and you look back at what compounding actually means as both an investor managing your own kind of future retirement and wealth or as somebody who works with clients about managing portfolios, or compounding actually does imply. I was thinking about that the other day, actually.”

   2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Go for it. I think that I really think this industry is changing so quickly. I think it's changing faster than I've. In my kind of career, in terms of what A lot of opportunity for somebody starting out. My advice I always give to all of our analysts who are starting out, and frankly, I give it to pretty much all of our team, is you've got to keep learning. This is constantly changing, and you've got to just, you've always got to be on that kind of learning. Curve, and that's how you get better. It's also where the opportunities come from a career standpoint.”

   2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “But it's in that guise of trying to think about how time works and Yeah, I won't spoil it for you. Read it. But it's the kind of book where even the most simple paragraph, you kind of reread it because you're trying to get your head around the fact that it's being written backwards.”

   2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “It's fascinating. He writes it backwards. So everything happens backwards. So the day starts. With the character going to bed. And it's written in as the consciousness of the man. And so it's brilliant.”

   2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Yeah, there's a great book Ian McEwen called Sweet Tooth, which is all about, it's got a great twist, which I won't go into, but it's a 1950s, 1960s kind of spies in the UK. And there's a book by Martin Amos, which is...”

   2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “To get you out of here So I think I've been very lucky in each stage of my career, I've always had, I think, somebody who has been, whether a manager or a mentor, but really helped me think through and frankly just supported me in my career. I think two particularly jump out. One is the person who actually took me to ING bearings and who I first worked with there, who sadly is no longer with us, but was just an incredible friend and in quite a pivotal time in my career really helped me think through what do I want to do next and kind of set me on that next kind of journey. And then the other one I have to say, a shout out to someone who was very early in my career who I worked with who I kind of looked up to in terms of their success, who became my wife. So that became kind of a good message. She continues to mentor me, you know.”

   2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “It were. And that tends to be something I think people have kind of forgotten, but from an investing standpoint is actually Pretty”

   2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “I think there are things that are kind of half on and half off the radar, like the impact of what's happening in demographics and immigration and changes like that. And what does that mean for inflation, for the different types of income streams that people are going to need is something that's kind of talked about, but always slightly in the background. I think that's going to come more and more to the fore. It ties into the fiscal policy, which is very much kind of talked about. I think that's one thing. I think second is we're still living through a lot of the post-COVID impact. And, you know, we don't, COVID's kind of done and it feels like it was many, many years ago. But there are a lot of industries and luxury is a good example, which is still being impacted by what happened then, both in terms of the lockdown and then the immediate kind of boom that happened afterwards. There are still a lot of things that are still trying to work their way through the system.”

   2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “For things that we kind of thought we'd done. And I think that creates a lot of opportunity for our clients to reinnovate things.”

   2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “It's really across the whole waterfront of what you just said. I mean, obviously, with HPS and GIP, with our partners, there's a lot of opportunity, we believe, to develop in the private credit and the infrastructure space, and also the crossover of those kind of areas. I think this crossover of public and private markets and what does that look like in portfolios, whether that's within a fund or in a portfolio, I think is going to be a big and very interesting theme. And the third area, I think, is we're constantly, obviously, we're always working with our active portfolio managers to develop better strategies and new ideas they have. But we are always, always looking back as well. Because I think you can fall into the trap of thinking you've done it. And I mentioned the example of, you know, US large cap equities in indexing. Why would you ever look at that as an innovation area?”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Decade on. And by the way, we launched a bunch of those as well, knowing that it would take a long time. We didn't expect to launch it would take off straight away, knowing that it would take time for the kind of market to get there. But we were comfortable we could manage that fund. And so often you end up in a situation where you're kind of waiting for maybe the liquidity of the market to be broad enough that an ETF works. So, you know, it's going to work in the future. It's just a little bit early now. So, there are a couple of different reasons why that may be the case.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “They were allowed, yeah. Yeah, so sometimes it's the regulatory, you know, it could be that the industry, the industry in the broad sense of the word regulators or whatever, aren't quite ready. You're not able to actually build the thing that you've got an idea for. It could be that the market is not quite ready. Fixed income ETFs is a good example. We looked at things 10 years ago and decided that actually the fixed income market wasn't ready. We weren't quite. ready to be able to do that in an ETF.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Oh, there's a whole treasure trove of. Yeah, we could do another podcast, I'm sure. But, you know, typically what's interesting about it is... There are two reasons why you might end up like that. One is it's a crazy idea, but there's just really no demand for it. And that's an easy.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Getting. And so, what's interesting is there's a psychological shift and a greater acceptance of saying, actually. Systematic investing using AI, that's really interesting and exciting. And so I think the second thing is we're seeing it through using AI to be better investors. And then the third one is product development. And so how can we use the data that we are able to collect and effectively deploy big data and the AI that we've developed in-house that sits on that to identify what are some of those themes that are coming up? What are some of the things that clients are talking about or being picked up in the news or whatever it is and be more kind of systematic, I would say, in being able to see what those are. And also we are able to use it to test and stress test strategies that are new in different market environments. So it's a really, again, it's a really exciting time for product development because it's giving us new tools that we didn't have before.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Yeah. So, you know, it's gone through its iterations. And so, you know, and they've got some fantastic examples of the way they've used machine learning stroke now AI to really understand every single day they will pass thousands of reports, earnings calls, et cetera, transcripts for sentiment. And the result, the investment results of those signals that they create are really quite fascinating and very lucrative in terms of investment alpha. And so we're really seeing a huge demand right now for systematic investing. And this is something that historically people were nervous was because it was a black box. They didn't understand it. And now people are using things like chat GPT, et cetera, which is a black box, but they're seeing the value that...”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “I think we're seeing AI in probably three areas. The first one is obviously AI is an investment theme, which is very well publicized, et cetera. And we're seeing that through things like data centers, obviously stocks, credit, et cetera. The second one is AI in terms of investment strategy. For example, BlackRock were very fortunate to have a systematic group investment group that has a 40-year track record and history of delivering really great performance. And they would argue they were doing AI well before it was called AI, when it was called machine learning or whatever it was called before that.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “We're seeing a lot of demand right now for things like equal weight or capped indices. We launched a top 20 fund, top T. We did the same thing with Nasdaq. Even the S&P 500, owning the top 20 stocks versus owning the 500 stocks is a very, very, very different game. And so even something like large cap US equities, which you would have thought there was nothing else to innovate in. Even that has been the area where we've probably done more in the last six months than many other areas because the dynamics of the US equity market have shifted so much in the last couple of years and investors are looking for different things.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Strategies in fixed income. So we're carving up the market in fixed income the way we did in equities through ETF. So if you want to own zero to three-year government bonds, own SCAV, if you want to own long-term treasuries, own TLT, if you want to own bits of the different types of credit crossover, you can now do that through ETFs. So, you know, it is an amazing tool. And what's fascinating about fixed income ETFs is that some of the fastest growing users are asset managers. So fixed income managers using ETFs as a way to be better at their job. And I think, again, that's that blending of indexing. But even in the equity world, equity indices are evolving. We were saying, if you look back to 2000, the top seven, you know, the whole kind of S&P was worth the equivalent to what the top seven stocks were worth six months ago. And so you mentioned earlier in the program equal weight S&P.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Other indices with Bloomberg for which we have products like Universal that actually are much more representative of fixed income. So part of it also is, you know, what are you benchmarking yourself against? And I think we went through that experience with equities and we are going to go through that or we're going through that experience with fixed income. And the other thing we're seeing with fixed income is that we're developing and building the more granular”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “You know Google or whatever it is. And so I think there's always been a sense of outsourcing those decisions kind of more so. The other thing is that the indices, the indexing market in fixed income has been slower to evolve. So you mentioned the ag and people tend to when they think about fixed income indexing, they automatically go to the ag is one index and it's a very specific index in terms of what it is. It doesn't have a huge amount of credit in it, for example. But there are”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “I think the historically fixed income, and I go back to when I started, was very much a world of limited transparency and kind of understanding, frankly. I think the understanding for most investors of fixed income relative to, I don't mean investors who are doing fixed income all every day, but for most retail investors in particular, I think people have a much more natural affinity to stocks than they do for bonds in terms of kind of the understanding. Bonds feel complicated at times. It feels like it's a world we don't quite understand, whereas equities you kind of”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “But in absolute terms, we're still to use the sports terminology, given it's the World Series, the first inning. Maybe the second inning. And then even if you look at what's really fascinating is if you look at, and we talked about active active ETFs, and again, that's still very early stages. But on 16.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “It feels, and having been, I can tell you, having been on the journey and been out there, you know, kind of pounding the streets on the value of fixing a TFs over the years, it feels like this has become really, really big. And it has. And yet when you think it in the context of the 140 trillion dollars of fixed income out there, ETFs are still a pretty tiny part of the market in terms of how people own bonds.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “So, I think that when you look at, I'll give you a couple of good examples. Digital assets, I think, is kind of fairly early days. iBit is incredibly fast growing. It was the fastest to 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 and now hopefully to 100 billion as an ETF. And we have an Ethereum ETF. I think there will be more product development in something like that. And again, for us, that's about bridging this kind of DeFi world with the traditional kind of finance world. That's one area. The second area is take something like fixed income. We've been building out fixed income ETF industry for 20 years. The industry is now two and a half-ish trillion dollars. We think it's going to be $6 trillion by kind of 2030. The growth is huge. Less than 2% of bonds in the world are in an ETF. Wow. So”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “We're excited about that. That's what we've built at BlackRock and iShares. But it's also meant that ETFs are very much kind of being used more broadly. And that's going to be, I think, part of how the industry evolves and then kind of matures.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “That remains very much of you how we think about continuing to expand the iShares platform. And that includes now using the ETF technology we've built to take things like active funds and wrap them into an ETF because the ETF is a more efficient way for many investors to actually own those different strategies. But again, it starts with the strategy. And I think that for us, it's about how do you, what is it that you're developing in terms of an exposure or a strategy? Why? How does it fit with the world that we see today in terms of where we think the world is going from a market standpoint and a macro standpoint? How does it fit in terms of kind of a portfolio construction standpoint? You're going to have waves of innovation right now. We're having a huge wave of ETF launches. And in particular, last two, three years, you know, the ETF, it's gone from being kind of very much on the side of the industry to being very central.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “I think there is a lot out there of throwing things out that sticks. Our approach is very much where do we believe that We can develop products, strategies, exposures that And then it was how do you inequities? Then how do you give access to more granular exposure like sectors or different countries? Then it was how do you move into different asset classes like fixed income, for example. And then more recently it's been something like digital assets with iBit. And that's really been the journey of ice years, right? And I think that's been therefore the journey of the industry as we've led it.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “The need to be able to risk manage and understand those portfolios in different scenarios is incredibly important. That's what Aladdin is about. With pre-Quin, what is so exciting is that I think over time, the private markets will become more transparent. There will be more data available and around. And very similar to what Aladdin and BlackRock did with public markets will happen in the private markets as well. And that, I think, will help more and more investors access private markets in the way and understand what it is that they have, partly of which is, again, understanding the different liquidity and being comfortable that they're different for a reason. And you're not trying to create a one-size-fits-all. You're trying to create a portfolio that delivers the right outcomes. Aladdin, I think, is going to be critical for that.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Incredibly important. I think that for anybody who is, for a wealth manager who is running a portfolio for a client, It's not just, as you know, it's not just about buying the different products or doing the asset allocation. It's also about the risk management of what does that portfolio look like. And that's really what Aladdin is about. And as more and more investors, whether that is a retail investor or wealth investor or whether that's a big pension fund, incorporate private markets into portfolios and blend private and public. And I think, again, if you go back over that 10, 15 year journey, we started with indexing on one side of the floor and active on the other side and we gradually brought those together and that became commonplace to blend. And I think we're now in that world of starting to blend public markets and private markets, which historically were completely distinct and were starting to kind of blend those because the industries are crossing over, more companies are staying private for longer, et cetera, et cetera. So as we bring those together,”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Maybe that'll come back. You know, we might need a bit of inflation, but yeah, one day, one day, Barry. Will we be back on the podcast too to cover that off? But I think that different role is very important. But there's a lot of development that is happening. To be able to make that more efficient than it has been historically. And I think that's, I think we will see a lot of change in the next couple of years.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Part of the way we've always thought about the role of socks and bonds has been different as well. Bonds is a ballast to a portfolio, stocks is a growth driver, for example. I think you've got to think about that.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Something tolerable. I think we're on a journey. And I think that is about, first of all, developing investment strategies and therefore and being able to put them in products that work for a wealth manager. Secondly, there's a big, you know, the operational lift, right? The technology development that is happening and we're working with a number of firms around how can we make sure that, for example, model portfolios can incorporate private markets in a more efficient, easier to use way. Going to be different to public markets. It should be different to public markets because I think the role of an infrastructure, for example, in a portfolio is different to the role of owning stocks or owning bonds. And I think that part of”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “To me, it's about the portfolio. Yeah, what's the solution exactly? What are you trying to achieve? And if it's a long term retirement or retirement income, whatever it is. And then what does the portfolio need to look like or should look like and how does it evolve over time? And then how do you do it? And what are the kind of mixture of tools that are most appropriate to get you there? That's the shift in thinking. So let's dive.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “That how that happens is the real work. And that may end up requiring an ETF, but I think there are lots of other ways that could open up the door to private markets being a... What are the strategies that we believe would help? Client and investor have a better portfolio for whatever their goals are. And then how do you best put that together”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Possibly. Look, it's definitely something that a lot of people are looking at, including ourselves. But there are a lot of ways to, I think the biggest story, I think people jump towards the kind of private marketing ETFs. And the real story is how do you open up access appropriately for more people to access private markets as part of the portfolio? So if we think about a world which we believe in, which you're kind of moving from, call it 60-40, you know, the traditional portfolio to more of a 50, 30, 20, where 20 is private markets. And that's applicable to somebody who owns a defined benefit scheme. In fact, they've got that already, probably more through the way the scheme's managed. But actually, if you then apply that to, say, to other pension types like a defined contribution scheme or a wealth investor, that kind of journey towards incorporating more private markets into a portfolio for all of the diversification reasons that we've talked about a lot.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “And that's what we heard over and over again, both again from people who had held or hold Bitcoin in digital wallets and felt that this was kind of an easier, better way to hold it.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Roughly that. And so there was a sizable kind of industry already out there, but for many clients or many potential investors, the ease, the comfort, the knowledge, understanding of an ETF wrapper was a great way of allowing them to buy into crypto, Bitcoin in this case, and make it potentially a bigger part of the portfolio. What's interesting is the number of in that explosive growth that iBid has had. The number of Buyers, investors of iBit who are already holders of Bitcoin in other forms was quite notable. And so I think it kind of tests to this idea of actually how do you access different markets, sometimes in quite traditional ways, and how do you bridge between this kind of traditional world and this decentralized world. And you're seeing the same thing with ether as well, with our ether fund.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “It's a real mixture. It is we'll have a lot of ideas. We'll have a lot of ideas that are driven by investment views we have as a firm, by our investment teams, by working with other people in the industry. And we will combine that with what we're hearing from clients and where clients we're engaging with clients all the time around their portfolios and seeing where are their gaps in a portfolio or where are their sometimes it's sometimes there are investment opportunities, but there isn't a way to get to it. Again, come back to what ETFs have done, like how do you give that access to something that was new? If you think about iBit, Bitcoin obviously had grown already to a pretty sizable industry. I think when I...”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Yeah, so there are a number of things that I look at and my team look at. One is how do we continue to make sure that our product range is At the forefront of innovation in terms of where the industry is going, how do we make sure that what our clients are looking for with delivering in Helping our clients actually get the best out of what we have. I started an investment strategy. We spent a lot of time talking to clients about what's going on in markets, how to build better portfolios, how to get the best out of the tools that they have that we need to build. And then what's next? What's the next trend or theme that's on people's minds?”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “What's been so great is the ability to be involved in lots of different parts of the firm. And, you know, whether that was, again, growing the European iShares business, whether that was running fixed income iShares, which was a fantastic opportunity and time or moment in time, I should say, in terms of really not just growing fixed-term ETFs, but changing the bond market and the impact we've had there to now, where, again, the breadth of the company with private markets and things like that. So it has been a great journey to be on personally, but also to see it from the inside.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “It's been fantastic. It's been an amazing experience. You know, the firm has grown so quickly in the last 10, 15 years, and not just grown in terms of assets, which is obviously one way to measure growth, but also just the breadth of what BlackRock does for our clients and the breadth of the number of clients that we talk to. What's, I think, so for someone like me,”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Yeah, I think it's just so I think the last 10 years in the US, if we are today in somewhere like Europe in the ETF industry where the US was 10 years ago, I think the next 10 years in Europe will be faster than the last 10 years in the US. Makes sense. Because I think that partly because there is a roadmap that the US has created. It's different because of regulation, all the things that you mentioned. But I think that everything is happening so much faster now. And you're seeing that in ETFs, you're seeing that in other parts of the industry as well.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “We've seen that change. It's definitely behind the US, but it is definitely happening. And I think the same forces and drivers that we've seen in the US are very much applicable to Europe. And ultimately will be to Asia as well, which I think will go on that kind of same journey. So I think it's just more of a matter of time or timing as to where we are now versus the US. And there are different country dynamics that everywhere in the world play into why different parts of the industry move quicker or slower. But I think the direction is definitely the same.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Is anything from central banks through to end retail investors in 401k plans or the equivalent in Europe? And I think that's been one of the secrets to why ETFs have grown so quickly is that they actually are very much a product or a tool for anybody and everybody. So it started very much with, I would say, kind of wealth managers and pension funds, but it grew out and out and out. And frankly, in Europe, we learn a lot from the way the US industry had grown. We talk all the time about how the European ATF industry is probably about 10 years behind the US. And so there's a bit of a roadmap there. I think we're seeing that happen in real time.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “It was pretty broad, actually. It tended to be wealth managers And it tended to be institutional investors, which would be primarily pension funds. But what's interesting is how that has How that's expanded over the last kind of decade, you know, if I look at the breadth of users now.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Yeah, it's kind of how do you get the best out of everything? How do you say, you know what, actually here's an area where I think that we can deliver alpha, which is really what when you say active, what you're really saying is like alpha, something beyond the index. And I come back to a point you made earlier, Barry, about how the industry shifted. I think what ETFs did is they shone a light on what is performance. And if you can get the index through an ETF, it's very efficient. Then as an active manager, you've got to deliver something more. And many, many active managers at BlackRock do deliver more. But I think that that element of the more”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Been equal cap. Totally. You know, investing in US equities is a decision. That's an active decision. Then deciding to use an ETF is an active decision. So we would talk to clients about what does it mean to use an ETF? How does it fit with active management? Which again, go back to... I think it's pretty well accepted now. I think BlackRock and the ETF industry has played a big, big role in this. But the concept of blending, indexing and active managers and alpha in one portfolio, that's kind of very accepted. People are going to get that. It's pretty standard. It wasn't back then 10, 14 years ago. And in some respects, it was slightly religious in terms of...”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “How do I then think about putting them in a portfolio? And what's interesting, I remember a couple of years in, probably 18 months into my time at BlackRock, we did a big study on how do you blend active and indexing. And we're very allergic to the word passive because we used to go out and say to people, which we still do, every decision you make is active.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “So I started in the iShares business and I actually set up an investment strategy team. And what we did was go out and talk to clients about what was going on in markets. We were part of BlackRock now. ICHAS was part of BlackRock. And so there was a huge pedigree of investing. And how do you take that externally to our clients and educate them about how ETFs could be used to implement these ideas, build portfolios? I have to say in the early days, a lot of it was just educating people on what is an ETF. Like how does it actually work? What is a creation? What is a redemption? And what do I need to understand and know? Secondly.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “That they had lived as they'd grown the US business and they were growing the European business. And that kind of just captured you. And I think, frankly, in the last 15 years, I've seen that and been fortunately been part of kind of driving that. But it was very clear that there was a big opportunity to do something different in an industry, an asset management industry that hadn't really been shaken up. And I think one thing that ETFs have done and iShares has led this is really shaken up the industry. on behalf of end investors.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source