BlackRock Adjusts Leadership Team for its Largest Mutual FundBlackRock Adjusts Leadership Team for its Largest Mutual Fund

By Trevor Hunnicutt

NEW YORK, Dec 7 (Reuters) - BlackRock Inc is makingleadership changes to its biggest mutual fund.

The world's largest asset manager is replacing one of thetop leaders on its $42 billion BlackRock Global Allocation Fund and adding three new portfolio managers, amove that comes as the fund's performance has lagged its rivals.

Aldo Roldan, a managing director and portfolio manager, isstepping down as portfolio manager on the fund because he wantedto reduce his day-to-day responsibilities, a BlackRockspokeswoman said Wednesday.

Roldan will continue to work on the Global Allocation teamas a "senior investor," focusing on research and analysis, shesaid.

Three other investors will get top billing, including RussKoesterich, the fund's head of asset allocation, as well asDavid Clayton and Kent Hogshire, who already assist on the fund.

The changes take effect Jan. 1.

Koesterich is particularly well known outside the company asits former global chief investment strategist, a role in whichhe traveled widely and spoke to the press about the assetmanager's investment views.

The company announced he was shifting to a new rolesupporting Global Allocation in March. The fund is a"multi-asset" portfolio of stocks, bonds and other investments.

New York-based BlackRock has been working to boost theinvestment performance of its stockpicking funds by introducingmore data mining and rules-based investment techniques to itstraditionalist teams, such as Global Allocation, which startedin 1989.

Much of the investment management industry has beenwrestling with a move from active funds to passive ones thatmerely track an index because those funds often perform betterand charge less.

BlackRock is a major manager of index funds through itsiShares exchange-traded funds business.

Relatively low-cost institutional shares of GlobalAllocation are up 3.7 percent this year, trailing 72 percent ofits peers, according to Thomson Reuters Lipper. Over 10 years,the fund is in the top 20 percent.

Investors pulled $8.1 billion from the fund this year,through November, according to the research service.

Roldan joined the Global Allocation team in 2006. He hasbeen one of three lead managers overseeing a sprawlingcollection of analysts, traders, marketing personnel and otherstaff who focus on the fund, alongside Dennis Stattman and DanChamby.

A specialist in emerging markets who holds a doctorate ineconomics and econometrics from the University of Pennsylvania,Roldan joined BlackRock when it acquired the team's formeremployer, Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, in 2006.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in New York; Editing by JimFinkle and Alan Crosby)