This week, we spoke with Edwin Conway, the global head of BlackRock Alternative Investors (BAI). BAI is one of the fastest growing parts of investment giant BlackRock. BlackRock itself is the world’s largest asset management company, managing USD 9.46 trillion in assets. Conway serves as the chairman of the BAI Executive Committee and oversees the strategic direction of the BlackRock Alternatives platform, which manages more than $300 billion in assets and has more than 1,000 employees.

We discussed how this company, known for passive investments, ETFs and indices, has engaged in alternative investments for 30 years. The company’s goal is to combine its deep expertise in Beta with its long-term position at Alpha. In the past five years, Conway has expanded BlackRock’s footprint in this area to five separate investment areas: real estate, infrastructure, hedge funds, private equity and credit.

Conway believes that typical institutional investors are rebalancing their stock and bond portfolios, adding alternatives to 20% of their entire portfolio. 60/40 is becoming 50/30/20. Alternatives are diversifying assets and creating higher returns in the current low interest rate environment. BlackRock expects this to attract trillions of new capital in the next decade.

The record of our conversation is Available here on Monday.

You can stream and download our complete conversation, including podcast additional content iTunes, Spotify, Google, Bloomberg, with Acaster. All early podcasts on your favorite podcast host are available Found here.

Be sure to check our Master of Business Next week with the University of Michigan Professor of Social Psychology Richard Nisbet. He is a joint director Culture and Cognitive Course In Michigan, focus on reasoning and basic cognitive processes. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which is “Thinking: Memoirs. “Malcolm Gladwell called him “the most influential thinker in my life.”