By Miles Weiss
BlackRock Inc. (BLK), the world’s largest money manager, is seeking regulatory clearance for its iShares exchange-traded funds to follow proprietary indexes rather than those developed by third parties such as Standard & Poor’s.
The application, filed by iShares yesterday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, would allow future and existing funds to use in-house indexes the firm will create. IShares, a San Francisco-based subsidiary of BlackRock, ranks as the biggest provider of index-based ETFs with some $649 billion in assets under management in more than 460 funds.