BlackRock expands access to systematic active investing

BlackRock today announced the launch of the iShares World Thematic Rotation Active UCITS ETF (THRW), an actively managed core thematic global equity strategy that seeks to dynamically capture the themes driving markets.

The fund offers an all-in-one investment solution that handles theme selection, timing, and portfolio management within one allocation. The strategy actively identifies, ranks, and rotates between short-, medium-, and long-term market themes, regularly updating its 200-300 equity holdings to take advantage of growing trends and limit involvement in declining ones.

In the current market environment, the BlackRock Investment Institute (BII) highlights that global equity returns are becoming increasingly dispersed, shaped by a narrow set of mega forces. Against this backdrop, BII emphasises the growing need for a more active approach, with investors needing to dynamically reposition as market leadership evolves across time horizons^[1].  We project that active ETF assets globally will reach $4 trillion by 2030^[2], while systematic strategies’ share of active equity expected to rise from 11% in 2024 to 15% by 2030^[3].

“Systematic investing is accelerating across Europe, forming a key part of what we call the ‘Next Gen Active’ barbell, bringing together outcome‑focused strategies and low‑tracking‑error building blocks that add precision and consistency to portfolios,” said Adam Riley, Head of International Wealth for BlackRock Systematic. “BlackRock strives to broaden investment options and increase accessibility through various wrappers, aiming to bring the transparency, flexibility, and convenience of ETFs to all types of investment approaches.”

Building on more than 40 years of experience, BlackRock’s Systematic Equity team combines human insight with extensive data resources and sophisticated artificial intelligence tools to deliver a disciplined, data-driven investment process. Within this framework, the systematic thematic rotation strategy brings clients a powerful combination of BlackRock’s active management capabilities and experience, and the breadth and scale of the world’s largest ETF provider.

The strategy uses AI to annually review around one million financial news stories, over 5,000 quarterly earnings calls, and roughly 1,000 thematic baskets and funds. Large language models then methodically transform this raw data into market themes, connecting companies to new cross-industry trends that could influence returns. Each day, a diversified modeling framework evaluates these themes, delivering insights to support active stock selection as part of portfolio optimisation, which strives to balance expected returns, risk, and costs.

The result is a scalable, dynamic approach designed to keep portfolios focused on the most current drivers of returns to deliver consistent and repeatable alpha, all within a diversified, transparent and liquid ETF structure.

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