"… When Fortune published its 2013 list of the world’s 50 Most Admired Companies, five among them were 25 years old or less. Four were the usual suspects from tech land: Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google. The oddball in this party of five was BlackRock (BLK), formed in 1988 by Fink and seven partners. They’d been Wall Streeters, at First Boston and Lehman. They were sell-side bond experts, but not just any sell-side experts. They were inventors and traders of the complex asset-backed instruments–like mortgage-backed securities–then newly available. Fink’s transformative idea was that the buy-side half of a trade needed help to understand these products. So his band re-created themselves as asset managers. … … BlackRock has been a supernova stock, shooting from a 1999 IPO price of $14 a share to about $320 recently. That’s 22 times the original price, and today the company has a market value of about $53 billion. Justifiably proud of this climb, Fink is fond of pointing out that it dwarfs that of the S&P 500 (up not even one time for the same period) and also wallops that of many well-known stocks, such as Berkshire Hathaway (up three times)."