Laurence D. Fink – Chairman & Chief Executive Officer Gary S. Shedlin – Chief Financial Officer Robert S. Kapito –President Matthew J. Mallow – General Counsel.

Robert Lee – Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc. Kenneth Worthington – JP Morgan Craig Siegenthaler – Credit Suisse Luke Montgomery – Sanford Bernstein Marc Irizarry – Goldman Sachs William Katz – Citigroup Michael Carrier – Bank of America Merrill Lynch Glenn Schorr – ISI.

At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the BlackRock Incorporated third quarter 2014 earnings teleconference. Our host for today’s call will be Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Laurence D. Fink; Chief Financial Officer Gary S. Shedlin; President Robert S. Kapito; and General Counsel Matthew Mallow.

All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks there will be a question and answer period. (Operator Instructions). Mr. Mallow you may begin your conference..

I’m Matt Mallow the General Counsel of BlackRock and before Larry and Gary make their remarks, as usual, let me remind you that during the course of this call we may make a number of forward-looking statements and we call your attention to the fact that BlackRock’s actual results, may of course, differ from these statements.

As you know, BlackRock has filed reports with the FDC which lists some of the factors that may determine the results of BlackRock to differ materially from what we say today and additionally, as is also usual, BlackRock assumes no duty and does not and will not undertake to update any such forward-looking statements. With that, let the call begin..

generating consistent organic growth; demonstrating the benefits of scale through operating leverage; and systematically returning excess cash flow to our shareholders. We successfully navigated that roadmap again this quarter generating double digit earnings growth.

More importantly however, and as you’ll hear in much more detail from Larry in a moment, BlackRock has never been better positioned to meet the needs of our clients.

Our global reach, unique blend of active and indexed offerings, strong overall investment performance, risk management and analytics capabilities, and One BlackRock culture differentiate us today in the asset management industry. BlackRock delivered third quarter earnings per share of $5.21, up 34% compared to a year ago.

Revenue rose 15% to $2.8 billion and operating income was $1.2 billion, 24% higher on a year-over-year basis. Non-operating results reflected a $43 million increase in the market value of our seed and co-investments largely driven by mortgage, private equity, and credit related investments.

Our GAAP tax rate for the quarter was 20.2% reflecting discreet benefits primarily due to the resolution of certain outstanding tax matters related to the acquisition of BGI. In connection with that transaction, BlackRock recorded a $50 million indemnification asset for unrecognized tax benefits.

Given the resolution of these matters, we recorded $50 million of G&A expense to reflect a reduction of the indemnification asset and an offsetting $50 million GAAP tax benefit. Both the $50 million G&A expense and the $50 million tax benefit have been excluded from our as adjusted results.

Our 26.2% as adjusted tax rate for the third quarter also benefited from $34 million of discreet tax benefits. We continue to estimate that 29% is a reasonable tax run rate for the fourth quarter and based on what we know today 30% is a reasonable projected tax rate for 2015.

BlackRock’s third quarter results were driven by $29 billion of long term net new flows representing an annualized organic growth rate of 3%. Flows were positive across all client businesses and regions, and despite a more volatile market environment, we continue to demonstrate the stability of our highly diversified platform.

Over the last 12 months BlackRock generated $134 billion of long term net new business representing 4% organic asset growth and an even faster rate of organic based fee growth as we benefitted from positive mix change associated with our faster growing higher fee retail and iShares businesses.

Third quarter year-over-year revenue growth of 15% or $377 million was driven by continued growth in base fees, performance fees, and revenue from BlackRock Solutions. We once again experienced year-over-year base free growth across all long dated asset classes.

Base fees increased $315 million or 15% from a year ago as average AUM increased due to organic growth, market appreciation and the acquisition of the MGPA real estate business.

Base fees were up 1% compared to the second quarter due to higher average AUM levels and the impact of one additional revenue day, partially offset by the seasonal decline in securities lending activity we typically see in the third quarter.

However, we enter the fourth quarter with lower spot assets under management than our average AUM for the third quarter which will impact our fourth quarter entry rate base fee level.

This decline was primarily driven by the appreciation of the dollar against foreign currencies, which given the global nature of our business, led to an $89 billion decrease in total AUM during the quarter.

Performance fees for the third quarter increased $37 million or 39% from a year ago driven by continued strong performance across our broad suite of single strategy hedge funds, real estate, and hedge funds solution offerings.

As a reminder, fourth quarter performance fees in 2012 and 2013 were elevated due to similarly sized one-time fees trigged by the wind down of opportunistic funds related to the financial crisis. We do not anticipate any such fees during the fourth quarter of 2014.

BlackRock Solutions revenue of $165 million was up 6% year-over-year and 13% sequentially due to increases in both Aladdin and FMA revenue. Our Aladdin business which represented 72% of BlackRock’s solutions revenue in the quarter grew 6% year-over-year and 9% sequentially.

We continue to successfully execute on large global implementations associated with record new business wins in 2013. Our Financial Markets Advisory business had a very strong revenue quarter driven by several large advisory assignments associated with ECB AQR Diagnostics.

Notwithstanding a more institutionalized post financial crisis advisory model, future FMA results may be difficult to predict as a function of the transaction based fee structure associated with this business.

Total expense for the third quarter rose $141 million year-over-year driven primarily by revenue related items including compensation and direct fund expense. Compensation and benefits increased $112 million from a year ago or 13% reflecting higher head count and higher incentive compensation driven by higher operating income.

While compensation as a percentage of revenue declined year-over-year, partly as a function of the timing of certain accruals, quarterly comparisons are less relevant as we manage compensation on a full year basis and our overall compensation policies have not changed.

G&A expense decreased $8 million year-over-year or 2% driven primarily by beneficial non-recurring items including the positive FX impact of remeasuring dollar balances held overseas to their respective functional currencies.

Sequentially G&A expense decreased $51 million reflecting the previously mentioned impact of positive FX remeasurement and lower legal and regulatory expense in the current quarter.

Excluding the positive impact of these items and taking into account a planned seasonal uptick in yearend marketing and promotional spend, we expect to see higher G&A expense in the fourth quarter relative to the first three quarters of the year.

Overall, total expense increased 9% from a year ago compared to a 15% increase in revenue over the same period resulting in an as adjusted operating margin of 44.2%. The year-over-year margin improvement of 300 basis points was positively impacted by the previously discussed lower level of G&A and compensation accruals in the quarter.

We remain committed to a consistent and systematic capital management policy. During the third quarter we repurchased an additional $250 million of stock and view that as a good planning rate for the remainder of the year.

As you are all aware, we traditionally review our capital management strategy with our Board each December for implementation in January of the following year. Our consistent earnings growth and stable financial results reflect the benefits of our diverse platform, long term client relationships, and commitment to alpha generation.

Quarterly net flows were positive in both our active an index franchises as well as each of our geographic regions with $11 billion from the Americas, $7 billion from EMEA, and $11 billion from APAC.

In global retail we saw long term net inflows of $5 billion during the third quarter bringing year-to-date inflows to $32 billion or 9% annualized organic growth. Retail flows were positive at both the US and internationally, but were limited by macro headwinds during the quarter that impacted our high yield and European equities franchises.

BlackRock’s diverse platform was well positioned to weather this market volatility as we nonetheless delivered overall positive flows with strength in outcome oriented offerings including unconstrained fixed income, multi asset, and alternatives products.

US retail flows of $2.8 billion were driven by strength in our outcome oriented fixed income suite including our strategic income opportunities fund or SIO, our strategic municipals opportunities, and global long/short credit funds.

During the quarter SIO raised $2.9 billion in net new flows from a combination of retail and institutional clients and remains the number two bestselling active mutual fund in 2014. Retail fixed income results were dampened by outflows from our high yield franchise which was impacted by investor rotation out of the sector in July.

Though our high yield bond fund has top decile performance, the fund experienced quarterly outflows of $1.6 billion. Our 40 Act Alternatives Funds raised nearly $600 million of net flows during the quarter and we continued to see significant opportunity associated with delivering institutional quality alternative solutions to the retail marketplace.

We recently expanded our retail illiquid alternatives suite with the launch of the Multimanager Alternatives Strategy Fund which allocate assets to a variety of affiliated and unaffiliated alternative investment managers and leverages the success of our hedge fund solutions platform BlackRock Alternative Advisors.

International retail net inflows of $2.1 billion were driven by our fixed income multi asset and index capabilities but were impacted by deteriorating market sentiment in Europe contributing to $3.8 billion in outflows from our European equities franchise.

Within fixed income, we saw $1.2 billion of flows into our fixed income global opportunities fund which is the cross border version of SIO and $680 million of flows into our BGF Euro Short Duration Bond Fund.

International multi asset net inflows of $1.9 billion reflected demand for our BGF Global Allocation Fund as well as growing traction for the cross border version of our flagship Multi Asset Income Fund.

We also took advantage of strong three year performance track records in Asian equities to capitalized on increasing demand with our top cortile BGF Asian Dragon and BGF Asia Pacific Equity Income Fund and our top decile BGF China Fund generating more than $500 billion in aggregate flows during the quarter.

Globalized shares generating $18.2 billion of net new business in the quarter, representing annualized organic growth of 7% driven by strong equity flows. Equity flows of $3.8 billion were driven by flows into the Core Series as well as demand for emerging markets and Asian equity exposures which offset outflows in European equities.

The buy and hold segment remains an important growth challenge for iShares. During the quarter we generated $7.3 billion of flows into US Core Series representing annualized organic growth of 23% and gathered $2.5 billion of flows into recently launched European Core Series representing annualized organic growth of 26%.

We continue to aggressively target growth in the fixed income ETF market. iShares show fixed income flows of $3.7 billion [inaudible] by $1.3 billion of flows into our core bond product AGG as investors looked for options to maintain exposure to the broad fixed income market in the current environment.

Year-to-date iShares ranked number one in market share of fixed income net flows globally. Our institutional business generated $5.6 billion in long term net inflows for the quarter primarily reflecting index net inflows.

We continue to see sizeable asset allocation driven flows both into and out of institutional index products as bar-belling continues to be a key [inaudible] among institutional clients with cost effective beta exposure being paired with alternative solutions to achieve uncorrelated returns.

Index fixed income inflows of $5.5 billion was driven by LDI activity including extensions of hedging or liability matching services.

Institutional active net inflows included $5.2 billion of net inflows into multi asset class products driven by continued demand for our LifePath Target Date suite and over $1 billion of flows into our Dynamic Diversified Growth strategy of DDG.

DDG is an unconstrained multi asset strategy that seeks to generate positive consistent returns in a range of market environments with significantly lower volatility than an equity portfolio. Multi asset and scientific active equity inflows were offset by outflows from active fixed income and fundamental equities.

Despite strong performance across our active fixed income platform, our institutional net flows were impacted by several client specific outflows driven by rebalancing and asset allocation decisions partially offset by continued strength in unconstrained fixed income strategies.

As you’re going to hear from Larry shortly, our broad fixed income platform and performance track record continued to position BlackRock extremely will to capture opportunities in the current environment.

In institutional core alternatives, inflows into hedge fund solutions were offset by outflows from several single strategy hedge funds and return of capital.

However, we had another strong quarter of fund raising in illiquid alternatives with nearly $1 billion in commitments reflecting ongoing momentum in hedge fund and private equity solutions and infrastructure.

As a result of strong fundraising in illiquid alternatives over the last two years that has brought in over $9 billion, we still have approximately $7 billion of committed capital to deploy for clients.

While return of capital impacts our inflows immediately, committed capital only translate into flows and assets under management as those dollars are invested.

In summary, in a quarter marked by increased volatility, our diversified business model delivered solid financial results and we are well positioned to take advantage of the numerous opportunities that lay ahead of us. With that, I’ll turn it over to Larry..

Thank you Gary. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining the call. We’ve seen some meaningful shifts in market dynamics since we spoke last quarter.

Divergent monetary policy, changes in global economic growth expectations, and heightened geopolitical unrest all impacted the investment landscape and resulted in higher volatility in both asset prices and currencies in the past few weeks.

That volatility is likely to continue as conflicting central bank policies and questions about the timing and magnitude of US interest rates hikes, led to an ongoing market uncertainty. Investors are also questioning whether the ECB’s recent efforts will be enough to reinvigorate the economy and stave off deflation.

I believe it’s going to take longer to stabilize Europe than many think and we are likely to see an aggressive ECB behavior for a long time.

It is in these times of volatility and uncertainty that clients turn to BlackRock for answers and we’re having more conversations with our clients that are deeper and more meaningful conversations than ever before.

Clients are turning to BlackRock because of our platform that we built over the past 26 years as a result of a comprehensive and deliberate process focused on culture, technology, and talent.

Our platform is built on the foundation of our One BlackRock culture, a belief in putting our clients first in all that we do and managing risk better and more thoroughly than any other asset manager in the world.

We built Aladdin with this in mind, to create a premier risk management and technology platform that allows everyone at BlackRock to speak a common language.

BlackRock doesn’t eliminate risk but it helps us to create an environment where our team is constantly aware of the risks and we are connected across the firm worldwide to optimize these results.

Increased connectivity through Aladdin and other sources leads to improved communication and in the BlackRock investment institute we have a forum for investment teams to share knowledge, to share insights with the idea that this will enhance Alpha generation across the firm. This team based approach is a critical differentiator for BlackRock.

We do not and never had have a centralized CIO. We don’t have a house view or any one person setting a single investment strategy for our platform. Our process enables our teams to make independent portfolio construction decisions to meet client objectives.

That may result in differing performance for our clients at times but it means we don’t have an overwhelming bias towards one strategy or another and we minimize the risk that it entails. We also believe that having a deliberate process to develop our people is critical for BlackRock’s success and our connectivity with our clients.

At our most recent Board meeting in September, we spent two days reviewing 320 individuals at BlackRock across the entire firm to identify BlackRock’s best talent. This is an annual exercise and includes a process to develop each of those individuals as global leaders, as global investors, and as global citizens.

This might mean moving into a new region of the world or into a new business and it helps to develop a team that will be deeper, with broader and global experience which will enable us to have better investors and better leaders in the future. The leadership changes we announced in the second quarter is an example of how we do this.

The move involved new roles for 10 senior leaders across the firm and those leaders are now in their new seats driving growth and enhancing our value proposition for our clients. Finally, BlackRock’s global diversified platform is a critical component of our strategy.

BlackRock is the only asset manager to offer active and index capabilities globally across all asset classes on one platform and we are constantly looking to innovate to find new ways of meeting our client’s needs.

When we combine our people, our technology, and risk management investment platform and wrap it all in the One BlackRock culture, the totality of the firm comes together to serve our clients’ needs. Nothing here is accidental. BlackRock was built to highlight these strengths and to minimize the risk of getting it wrong.

While we will never compromise on our philosophy of building our culture, sometimes we do get it wrong and when we do we will do what’s necessary to rebuild.

We rebuilt our scientific active equity platform which now has 96% of its assets above benchmark or peer mediums for the last three years and while flows have not improved as quickly as we might have expected given the strength of the performance, this quarter we saw inflows in scientific active equity for the first time since we did the merger with BGI.

We made changes in our Asian equity business several years ago and Andrew Swan today has a top cortile three year track record. As you know, we’re now in the process of rebuilding our US fundamental equities. We are excited about the progress we are seeing from our new teams and remain committed to that effort.

Our confidence in our ability to rebuild the US equity platform stems in part from the success we’ve seen elsewhere highlighted by the rebuilding process we started over six years ago in our fixed income business. The investments we made in that business are clearly paying off.

BlackRock saw $11.1 billion of net inflows in fixed income in the third quarter and now we have seen, in total, $48 billion year-to-date in fixed income across both active and index reflecting the stability, the breadth, and the strong performance of our fixed income franchise.

We have a deep bench of talented senior fixed income investors with more than 400 fixed income investment professionals including 150 sector specialists. They manage $1.3 trillion in AUM across a full range of high performing active, index and iShare strategies.

With 87% of BlackRock’s active taxable fixed income assets above the benchmark or peer mediums for the three year period, BlackRock’s offerings are positioned to help clients achieve their desired investment outcomes regardless of their specific needs or macro expectations.

Our unconstrained fixed income strategies continue to be a core theme for clients and we saw nearly $5 billion in flows in the third quarter and nearly $20 billion in the last 12 months across our top cortile unconstrained bond franchise including SIO and strategic municipal opportunities in the US, our fixed income global opportunities product in Europe, as well as our flagship retail alternative fund global long/short credit.

We have seen continued momentum early in the fourth quarter as well as heightened client interest and we expect unconstrained strategies to remain a strong driver of growth for BlackRock going forward.

The breadth of BlackRock’s fixed income franchises further highlighted by our top decile total return and high yield bond funds in total return we’ve seen a significant recent increase in flows and client interest and see a meaningful long term growth opportunity.

In high yield, while we experienced some market headwinds in the quarter our performance continues to position us to win in this asset class. As a result of BlackRock’s strong active fixed income performance track record, we’re increasingly being rewarded by retail and institutional gatekeepers with improved positioning on platforms and buy lists.

We see a sizeable opportunity in fixed income in the coming quarters and we believe BlackRock is the best positioned firm in the industry to capitalize on that opportunity both in active an in index.

On the index side, more and more investors are recognizing iShare as an efficient tool for investors to manage market exposure to generate Alpha through asset allocation. Investors have been increasingly turning to iShares as core component of their fixed income portfolios.

In the first few weeks of October we’ve seen more than $7 billion in net new flows into fixed income iShares including our Barclay’s Aggregate ETF AGG. We’ve seen a substantial uptick in secondary market trading volume as well exhibiting iShares ability to provide liquidity for our clients.

BlackRock believes fixed income ETFs represent a substantial growth opportunity given they only represent about 4/10ths of 1% of the global fixed income markets. A fraction of the ETF penetration compared to the equity market where ETF represents about 3% of the global markets.

We believe iShares can offer an attractive solution to the needs for fixed income liquidity with nearly $200 billion of AUM across a 189 fixed income ETFs. BlackRock’s product breadth and depth are key differentiators.

I need to reflect for a moment because when BlackRock acquired BGI five years ago BlackRock’s global iShares assets under management were $385 billion. I’m proud to say that BlackRock’s iShares closed the third quarter with nearly a trillion of assets under management.

We continue to drive global expansion and grow our iShares market share by pursuing several areas of [inaudible] ETF usage including core investment, precision exposures, and financial instruments.

BlackRock’s ability to combine active and index strategies and deliver the entire full firm to clients is critical as client demand for investment outcome and solutions increase. One of the most common outcomes investors are targeting is to sustain a certain level of income leading up to and through retirement.

Just this month, we launched an income campaign in Europe and the Middle East targeting advisors and consumers with a dual objective of raising brand awareness for BlackRock as well as educating clients on the importance of income investments as part of their portfolios.

Outcome oriented income focused products have been a significant driver of retail flows and products like SIO and multi asset income or MAI were significant contributors to our results in the third quarter. Our global basis or our multi asset income franchise crossed over $10 billion in AUM and as seen $4.5 billion of net inflows so far in 201.

BlackRock’s multi asset franchise is a key differentiator and our team based culture enables our multi asset managers to benefit from the best alpha engines and risk management capabilities BlackRock has to offer.

I’d like to turn to a business through which we serve as a trusted advisor to some of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world. This is our financial markets advisory business or FMA business within BlackRock solutions.

Since BlackRock started FMA business in 2008 we have completed now more than 330 assignments for 185 clients in 30 countries generating more than $1 billion of revenues in BlackRock solutions. In the third quarter we reached a significant milestone for the team and the firm. With the substantial completion of FMA’s crisis era liquidation assignments.

FMA’s track record includes the risk control liquidation of long term wind down vehicles totaling more than $110 billion which resulted in strong performance for our clients. That track record also includes supporting clients with execution advice on strategic transactions totaling more than $660 billion.

As a result of this track record of proven success and a more stable environment marked by heightened financial regulation, we are now helping clients position their balance sheets to maximize value and thoroughly managing risk including numerous assignments as part of the Dodd-Frank Stress Test in the United States CCAR planning initiatives, the ECB AQR and most recently in August, the FMA business of BlackRock was selected to provide consultancy services to the European Central Bank on the design and implementation of their ABS purchase program.

This marks a real transition for the FMA business from a crisis oriented work to differentiated advisory and consultancy services. In all our businesses BlackRock strives to be a trusted advisor to our clients from institutions to end consumers.

As a trusted advisor to our clients we also believe we have a responsibility to engage with regulators to promote a safe and sound financial system. We know there is growing concern for many around about liquidity and markets.

We believe our success at BlackRock depends on investor’s continued confidence in the markets and so we have a shared interest in working with regulators on these issues. In closing, I want to share with you the reaction to BlackRock I witnessed during the last four days where I spent at the IMF Annual Meetings in Washington DC last week.

During that time I met with more than 30 clients. In total BlackRock meet with 141 clients who are among the world’s leading financial institutions and I was struck by how BlackRock’s reputation and position in the financial marketplace came through in each and every meeting.

Investors are turning to BlackRock for advice and for investment solutions and it was a very gratifying time for us to be as part of these exceptional discussions and to see the actions clients are looking to give to BlackRock to be a thought leader and to help them provide them with better financial futures.

I believe BlackRock has never been better positioned to meet the needs of our clients around the world.

We remain focused on performance, we remain focused on strengthening our leadership team, remain focused on developing our talent, remain focused on enhancing our differentiating platform to unlock value for our clients, and of course, to our shareholders.

With that, I want to thank our leadership team and all of our employees for delivering a strong quarter and continuing to work towards building better financial futures for our clients.

Before we take up your questions I wanted to mention that in addition to Gary, Matt, and myself here in New York we have Rob Kapito joining us on the line from Hong Kong where he and the BlackRock team there are hosting BlackRock’s Second Annual Asia Wealth Symposium bringing together our clients across the region.

Rob is also leading our fourth Knowing BlackRock Event, a series of internal events around the world that are part of an ongoing effort to foster a One BlackRock culture, to foster driving better leadership, and to foster driving better performance and better execution. Let me open it up for questions. .

(Operator Instructions) Your first question is from the line of Robert Lee with KBW..

I wanted to ask a question on the alternatives business and I think Gary, you mentioned in your comments that you obviously had some realizations, returned some capital, and also had maybe some outflows from discreet hedge funds.

But if you look at that business it’s pretty sizeable, it’s a hundred odd billion and that’s one place that despite the success you’ve had across the firm where flows have continued to be kind of break-evenish despite the size.

Can you maybe give us a little bit more color on underneath the business, kind of maybe which strategies are having kind of the flow issues or some of the puts and takes, if you will, that are going on behind it?.

I’m going to open it up and then I’ll let Gary really get into some of the details. We are very excited about our flows and the situation we have in alternatives. We have returned some large pools of money back to our investors.

We had huge [inaudible] mortgage strategies that we liquidated in July that were quite successful to our investors and so that is a decline in our assets. But in our illiquid strategies we do not put those assets under AUM until those monies are invested.

So we have a firm commitment for those monies, and that’s now totaling $7 billion of flows over the last few years and they continue to grow, and we put those monies to work over the course of the next several years.

So in reality, we are recycling our alternatives strategy quite successfully and I believe the momentum is accelerating towards more opportunities for BlackRock in the hedge fund arena. I’ll let Gary go into some specifics, but the macro number masks the successes we’ve been having. .

Rob, no one would like this to be a little cleaner and simpler to understand than I would and we spend a lot of time on it. But we’ve got about $113 billion of total alts of which we classify $88 billion of those effectively as core and we strip out currency and commodities from that when we think about the core business.

I think obviously, as Larry mentioned, return on capital, it does complicate the matter a little bit. I mean, obviously, this quarter alone we had return on capital of a little over a billion which effectively matched about a little less than a billion of new commitments that we raised in the current quarter.

Year-to-date, our return of capital is about $2.8 billion and that was again versus last year where it was close to $3 billion. It’s clear that over the last two years, I guess since the beginning of ’13 and Larry mentioned we’ve raised about $9 billion in commitments and I think, you know, candidly we’re looking for the right opportunities.

In a perfect world perhaps we would have invested some of that money a little quicker to basically match the timing better. But you know obviously, we’re not going to put client interests behind what happens in our core flows in terms of return on capital versus putting the assets in the ground.

It also is impacted by a lot of ins and outs which, you know, is frankly the same phenomena that impacts some of our institutional index business.

But, if we basically look excluding the return on capital, and I know this is a little unfair, but if we effectively exclude kind of one larger hedge fund that has frankly been a little more challenged in the last year or so and the way we look at the core health of the business, that would put up about $1.4 billion of core alts flows in the quarter with retail alts being about $400 million of that and institutional being about a billion.

On the retail side that’s really again, being driven as Larry has mentioned, our flagship global longshore credit but we’re also now having good flows from global longshore equity. I mentioned we recently launched the new multi manager fund which basically pulled in about $100 million this quarter already so that’s off to a good start.

On the institutional side again, excluding return of capital and this one challenged hedge fund, we saw strong flows into BAA of close to $350 million, our fund to private equity business invested about close to $275 million in the quarter, real estate had about $200 million in the quarter.

Our alternative solutions which is a key growth area, was close to $150 million. So there’s actually very strong pockets of momentum around it however, it takes a little bit of commitment from you and us to make sure you can see all of that happiness..

If I could maybe ask one follow up which I’m sure is on a lot of people’s minds, you know, the turmoil from one of your competitors and the assets that may be kind of in play or in motion as a result of that.

I guess I’m particularly interested in your thoughts as it relates to the DC world where, you know, certainly the total return fund has been pretty well entrenched and there’s usually not a lot of fixed income options out there.

But how do you feel about if you look at the opportunity set how do you feel about your ability to kind of start capturing some share there and at the same time are you starting to see more DC plans thinking about a broader range of options within their fixed income selections..

I think you’ve identified a great growth opportunity for us. A, on the DC land, managers are entrenched until they’re not.

We have had a historically very strong presence in the DC side in the index equity and target date products and so we have great relationships and now because of our strong performance and breadth in our fixed income, we have an incredible chance now to leverage those relationships and indeed we are indeed winning more wins in the DC side and we do believe this is going to be a great opportunity.

In addition, as people think about fixed income especially on the DC side, we are seeing evidence of people moving out of a total return type of product into a more unconstrained strategies too so this is going to be an opportunity for us in the coming years..

Your next question is from the line of Ken Worthington with JP Morgan..

Topic de jour, a lot of the intermediate term investment dollars in motion – so first to what extent do certain categories of institutional investors already have so much money managed by BlackRock that it’s hard for them to invest more with you? By following up with Rob in DC, you’re doing so well on iShares in the DC channel, does that somehow constrain you on the fixed income side for example, or are there other categories?.

Ken, we have not seen one example where our scale and our presence with our clients are being impacted. We actually won some business from one client already in the DC side where when we did the BGI merger they were concerned about our large presence within their plans.

Over the course of the years they’ve become accustomed to our large presence and they’ve indeed since then awarded us more business. Well, we’ve been awarded more business again from them. So we’re not seeing any evidence of that at the moment.

I think importantly, more and more clients are separating the amount of business we have in beta products versus alpha products so I think we’re in a very good position now to take on a larger share of wallet with more clients..

Then money in motion again, it seems to be going into cash, short term bond, intermediate term bond currently, what asset categories do you think are best positioned over the next year? So for example when capital had its issues you had money go out of equities actually go into PIMCO and into fixed income so there was a big switch.

What categories do you think are best positioned over the next year or plus?.

Where are you identifying the flows? Are you doing it in the mutual area? What people can’t see is what’s going on on the institutional side and let me just highlight the institutional side. On the institutional side, generally consultants determine how given managers are perceived and if there’s changes in perception there’s money in motion.

That’s a slow process, in some cases it’s going to take quarters, maybe even a year. But we have had more buy recommendations added to BlackRock in the last few months mainly because of our five year success in performance. So much of it had to do with the timing of our success.

There is not a single event that is stimulating some of this it is just because the consistency of our positioning in fixed income and obviously because the events that you’re alluding to there’s been more change. We are seeing more opportunities over the next quarters and years of money in motion into various fixed income strategies.

What we are seeing more and more clients looking at, they’re looking for outcomes, they’re looking for solutions. They’re not moving money across asset categories so most of the money, if it is being moved, it’s being moved from one fixed income to another fixed income player and then you’re seeing biases moving.

The one area where we’ve just been awarded a big assignment is a big institution that would have been awarding us something in the total return side of fixed income and they determined to award us a large assignment in the unconstrained fixed income.

So that’s where we’re seeing the biases change but there is a lot of money in motion going from total return in one shop to another shop and I believe there is quite a bit of movement today in the institutional side that should show up worldwide in the next few quarters..

Your next question comes from Craig Siegenthaler – Credit Suisse..

First just to hit on the margin, the adjusted result of 44.2 looked very strong. I’m just wondering if you can provide some color on the sustainability of this level and it also looks like G&A expenses were a little light driven by FX and there’s always the seasonal G&A trends in 4Q which tends to be higher.

So maybe just provide us a little color there and maybe you can help us in terms of what a good go forward range is?.

So a couple of things on margins. Obviously, in the context of year-over-year comparisons you obviously have to look at the relevant quarters that you’re comparing and so I think from Q3 to Q3 if you will a couple of things went on.

Obviously, we had strong beta from that Q3 to Q3 period which obviously helps drive revenue growth and you saw not only in addition to our organic growth, we actually put up 15% year-over-year revenue growth which is a pretty good number. On the expense side really two things. As you’ve mentioned, one is our G&A clearly was low in the quarter.

I think we highlighted sequentially that there was about a $51 million gap which was primarily attributable to the FX remeasurement and lower legal fees and expenses relative to the last quarter where we called them out as being somewhat high.

So beta driving one direction, expense driving the other direction and then obviously, as we’ve mentioned both this quarter and last quarter some changes in comp accruals that make quarter-over-quarter comparisons a little less relevant.

But mentioning that we really hadn’t changed comp philosophies and so as you look at full year accruals I think that’s a better indicator. Then of course you take all of that and you go into the fourth quarter and I think there’s no question that beta comparisons year-over-year will look much less muted.

It was a strong fourth quarter in beta last year. It’s not looking like a very strong fourth quarter this year so that will impact obviously year-over-year comparisons.

We mentioned the FX impact so we’re going in with lower spot AUM into the quarter than our average and as you correctly mentioned, in addition to the seasonal uptick in our [MMP] spend which is actually also planned, we’ve got some rougher comparisons on the performance fee because of the opportunistic fees that we booked last year.

I think if you take all of that into consideration I would suggest that the 44.2% in the quarter is probably not something we’d be looking to repeat in the fourth quarter and I think as it relates to margin guidance, I think our margin guidance hasn’t changed as it relates to the overall business..

Just a follow up on the management turnover at one of your competitors.

We’ve only had three business days in the third quarter result and we only have mutual fund data there but if you could size of the potential opportunity given your good performance, wide product menu across 401k, retail, and then institutional, which one are you more excited about in terms of growth in your active bond business?.

It’s still too early to determine how much is going – it’s fair to say there’s a sizeable opportunity. It’s in the 10s of billions of dollars.

We’ve seen recent strong momentum but it’s going to play out over quarters and maybe a year and as I said, it’s going to be – in the core fixed income strategies it’s going to be in the unconstrained fixed income strategies.

You may see people, and I think there is evidence that you’re seeing some people moving into ETFs and maybe this is as a holding pattern. But I just want to underscore we are seeing this type of flows because of our five years of performance.

I just want to remind everybody that we had $48 billion of flows in the first nine months and so we continue to just think it is all about performance, it is all about positioning, it is also because of our strength in beta and alpha products and fixed income. So it is our platform that has also differentiated and our global positioning.

But as I said this is a sizeable opportunity and there is increased momentum..

Your next question comes from Luke Montgomery – Sanford Bernstein..

Kind of a big picture question here, you’ve got institutional index strategies contributing just 10% of your revenues but I think those AUM receive about a 40% weight in the conventional calculation for organic growth.

So if you exclude those assets I think the organic growth on what I think we might call revenue critical AUM has been ranging between 5% and 7% on a trailing year basis. I don’t know of many asset managers of any size that are flowing at that rate and perhaps I’m wrong, but it really doesn’t seem like that’s reflected in your multiple today.

The question is sort in terms of messaging what’s it going to take how investors view your organic growth rate..

Hopefully, you tell everybody. I mean, look it’s a great point, it’s one that you know we have been trying to tell a little bit differently than the way you just stated it both at investor day and even today.

We’re trying to basically point to a concept of organic based fee growth being in excess of organic asset growth which is by virtue of stronger growth in our retail and our iShares business, or obviously relative to the institutional business and in particularly institutional index business.

I would say that we do give you ways to get there in terms of the disclosure.

There’s ways to back that out but I’m mindful that it’s always easier if we do that for you and I think it’s fair that we are always thinking about ways to improve our disclosure and to help investors and analysis better understand our business and we’re actively considering whether or not we should make some changes going into next year.

I mean, we do break out on the AUM tables exactly that component of flows and obviously, the beginning balance of our institutional index business so you can actually go ahead and do that and I don’t want to suggest that the institutional index business is not a very important component of the firm, but you’re right to suggest it has lower revenue characteristics than some of our other businesses and that in markets such as this the velocity of those assets tends to be a little bit greater so even though you’re seeing $5 billion of net flows there’s basically significantly more inflows and outflows that happen every quarter to get to that net number.

So we take your point, we appreciate it, and we are going to give it a lot more thought as we go into the end of the year..

I think the fee versus AUM basis for presenting organic growth is interesting but maybe it’s just as simple as showing organic growth figure excluding institutional index in your press release. That’s what I might suggest..

I think that’s one way to do it. Though again, that data is there for people who want to figure it out. .

I would just also want to say that I don’t want to dismiss the institutional index business and we love it, we think it’s a growth area, we think it’s a very important connector with our clients as I discussed earlier especially on the DC side which is really an institutional component and it’s a connector to so many of our other businesses.

That’s the opportunity of it. Obviously, Gary and team will look at how we can better account so you have a better understanding of our growth rates and our revenues. But we don’t want to dismiss a great component of our business..

Your next question comes from Marc Irizarry – Goldman Sachs..

Just following up on the organic growth, you know, you are out there with a forecast for 5% organic growth and I just want to get a sense of two things. You’ve constructed that view that you can get to that organic growth rate at some point in time and I think you’ve given us some of the building blocks.

Maybe you can just review that but also, what kind of assumptions are embedded in a forecast like that in terms of manager replacement? Obviously, there is a lot of money in motion, some of which you would have expected to be on the fixed income side, but I’m curious also, manager replacement and volatility, how that sort of plays into that forecast and what we should expect?.

A great question. Look, 5% when we laid it out was viewed as a target. It’s an aspirational target. We’re very serious about making sure we have strategies, business strategies, and appropriate talent, and making sure that we provide resources for those businesses to get there. We very much still believe in the fact that that is a number we can achieve.

We are very much still focused on the three components of that growth with iShares being low double digit growth, retail being high single digit growth and our institutional business being low single digit growth obviously, with faster growing parts of that business offsetting some of the headwinds we face in DB.

So, we’re continuing to prosecute the strategy and we still feel incredibly comfortable about that. I would say that it’s not a quarter-to-quarter number for us. It’s basically getting there on a more long term stable basis.

We obviously – I’ll come back to the discussion we just had with Luke, which is actually if you strip out some of the more lower fee components which have been a little bit more volatile in recent quarters, one might suggest that we’re already there on a trailing 12 basis for some of those businesses but I’m mindful that’s changing the goal post a little bit and I think in the context, and Rob’s on the phone, he may want to chime in obviously, there are significant amounts of cash yet on the sidelines that when that gets deployed that will actually have an important element to our ability to attract some of those assets.

I think we’re still moving forward and we’re holding people accountable to get there and our sincere hope is that we’ll be able to, in the near term, be able to talk about getting there very consistently..

Your next question is from the line of William Katz – Citigroup..

Just coming back to the money motion discussion [inaudible] very topical, Larry you highlighted sort of the five year track record as being a key differentiating factor for you.

Just coming at scale the other way, how important is scale and capacity as well as a consideration for all the consultants as they think about incremental opportunities, maybe perhaps some PIMCO?.

As I said earlier Bill, I don’t think CL is a negative, I think CL has proven to be a positive for us and we have plenty of growth opportunities in our unconstrained area.

That’s going to be the area where we will ultimately have capacity issues but we have measured that and we have a lot of bandwidth to continue to grow in our unconstrained strategies. This is something we look at with our strategic product management group.

This is the group that is trying to design new products and trying to eliminate products that are underwhelming. I think that’s another reason why we are winning so much business in some many different fixed income strategies. I think the highlight is it’s not just the active fixed.

We actually won some inactive fixed, and unconstrained fixed, and iShares fixed income. We’re seeing inquiry in our model based fixed.

It is the scale and breadth of our fixed income platform across the globe, is the reason why we’re having so much dialog with the consultants worldwide and it is allowing us to be well positioned for that money that is moving. .

Your next question comes from Michael Carrier – Bank of America Merrill Lynch..

You guys put a whitepaper out I think a few weeks back just on some of the issues in the fixed income markets and some of the longer term solutions.

Just given the recent volatility we’ve seen – I don’t know if you want to call it hiccups but some new issues in terms of liquidity I just want to get your view, I think a lot of the things you guys discuss in terms of the long term fixed makes a lot of sense.

Some of those things is just a lot tougher to do in the near term, you know, when we may fax increased volatility and given the amount of assets that have gone into fixed income and the reduced inventory on broker or dealer balance sheets I just want to get your sense what are you guys doing or what can you do to try to protect your investment returns in some of the lack of liquidity in the market which can impact the returns for investors..

I would say overall the markets are performing quite well. There have only been a few circumstances where you’ve seen really [inaudible] type of trading behaviors in the last few months. In any one single day or single week you may have seen some spreads widening but over a course of a two to three month period of time they narrow back.

I think there’s been some great consistency across the fixed income market.

That said, we are worried about the liquidity in the fixed income markets, especially in the corporate bond area where there is just so many different [inaudible] and so many different issuances and there’s no consistency and importantly this is a big role that the investment bankers and Wall Street play in terms of providing balance sheet and navigating your positioning within the fixed income universe and that balance sheet has been reduced significantly and so it does, at times, present liquidity issues.

This is why we have been so loud in stating that we need a more expedient adoption of electronic protocols and markets. I do believe this is one of the areas where regulators need to focus. I spoke about this at an [IMS] session this past weekend, that I think it’s imperative that we focus on this.

As the regulators have put more capital demands on banks, by definition the capital markets are playing a larger and larger role in terms of financing corporations and financing different organizations.

With that in mind now, we need to be focusing on how to improve the capital markets in making sure they provide a stable, a mechanism for buying and selling securities.

We’re in this transition phase right now and the faster and sooner we have this adaptation of electronic trading the sooner we have standardization of some form of corporate bond issuance, and then importantly we need behavioral changes across the board.

This is going to take time and so the worry we have is do we have enough time before there’s a true liquidity event that really destabilizes the market. This is why I said in my prepared statement, we need to be working with regulators to make sure we have a more stable trading environment.

We are the biggest beneficiaries in the world as the largest asset manager. We benefit when there’s greater liquidity. We need to make sure that our clients believe that investing is safe for them too so this is key.

Now, in saying that though, because we are a large client of all the different firms worldwide, if there’s balance sheet that is off or just because of our relationships, we have an advantage but that’s not a lasting type of thing and this is why we are so much in front, whether it’s writing or working with regulators, working with the street to build a more robust electronic market..

Your next question comes from Glenn Schorr of ISI..

Just a follow up question. You mentioned a couple of things impacting on the retail side but the last 12 months your organic growth rates is in like 11%, this quarter it was 4%. I’m curious how much you think of that as more environmental versus maybe talk about some of the successes you’re pushing through on your distribution strategies..

As Gary suggested, we had outflows in high yield, that was environmental. We had outflows in European equities, that was environmental. On the positive side we had inflows in other products. I think it speaks very loudly to our platform.

Obviously we want to be beneficiaries of all the areas where there’s going to be inflows but there are going to be periods of time where our client interests are going to be navigating out of those platforms.

We also saw even in iShares, in the last few weeks of September we saw large movement out of some European iShares products, European equity iShare products. So this is all environmental.

We truly believe we’re penetrating more distribution channels, more [RIA] channels, a broader distribution channel in Europe than ever before and so I think we are in a very good position for whatever is money in motion in the retail channels, we are going to continue to see some elevated growth. We are strengthening our positions across the world.

As I talk about our strategic product group we’re evolving our product set so we are responding to the needs of clients and so I feel very good about how we are positioned in retail and iShares and importantly we are going to continue to build our brand and I think we have done a very good job at building brand awareness and now we need to continue to do that and be successful in that.

Gary, do you have any more to add to that?.

I mean to put some numbers into perspective in terms of European equities, I mean it happens, again maintaining still good three, five year performance there, you know, that cost us close to $4 billion in the quarter in retail in outflows and then high yield again top decile performance and rotation there cost about $1.7 billion, $1.8 billion for the quarter.

So if you just think about the magnitude of those two products still with decent performance in fact, some exceptional performance in some cases, that [inaudible] the growth rate just in the quarter alone in those two areas.

So the good news is as Larry said, we had continued strength in the EMEA index, we had continued strength in fixed income, continued strength in multi asset, and I think without that there’d be a very different story and that’s part of the diversification and stability story we’re trying to tell..

Ladies and gentlemen we have reached the allotted time for questions. Mr.

Fink, do you have any closing remarks?.

The last comment Gary just said I think is really key as you think about BlackRock. I think we have a unique business model, a unique culture that is differentiating us and once again allowing us to deliver a strong third quarter.

We have never been as well positioned to meet the needs of our clients worldwide and I think clients are turning to us more than ever before because of the consistency over 26 years of a comprehensive and deliberate process of focusing on our culture, our team, our technology, and our talent and I think this is very critical.

As I said earlier in my prepared remarks, when we combine our people, and our technology, and our risk management on top of our investment platform and wrap it up with one common BlackRock culture, the totality of the firm comes together and it serves our clients well.

I can say in the fourth quarter and going forward we’re going to just be as intently focused on achieving our performance, on strengthening our leadership relationships with our clients, continuation of developing our talent.

As Gary said it really well, our highly diversified platform allows our investors to have a greater stability with more consistent growth than any other asset manager and I’ll leave it at that. Thanks everyone. Talk to you at the end of the fourth quarter..

This concludes today’s teleconference. You may now disconnect..