A giant RIA custody and brokerage clearing specialist kept assets steady last year, despite market woes.

Abigail Pierrepont Johnson FMR (dba Fidelity Investments) Chair, President, CEO

That's one tidbit revealed yesterday by Fidelity institutional president Mike Durbin in the FI section (pages 14 through 17) of the Boston Behemoth's 2018 Shareholder Update. The report also covers personal investing (PI), workplace investing (WI, highlighted by 401kWire, our sister publication), enterprise services (ES), a health care group, and asset management (AM).

FI (which includes Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions, i.e. FCCS, the unit that handles RIA custody and broker-dealer clearing) ended 2018 with $2.6 trillion in assets under administration, level with the end of 2017 (while the S&P 500, for example, fell 4.4 percent). FCCS added more than $100 billion in net new client assets for a fifth year in a row.

Meanwhile, Fidelity's AUM fell 1.0 percent to $2.42 trillion at the end of 2018, and AUA, fell 1.5 percent to $6.69 trillion. In the AM section on pages 21 through 23, AM's new president, Stephen Neff, confirms that Fidelity's discretionary AM products brought in $100.8 billion in net inflows in 2018, a 318-percent increase, despite net active equity product outflows of $53.2 billion.

Fidelity parent FMR brought in record revenue of $20.4 billion last year, up 11.5 percent, chairman and CEO Abby Johnson confirms in her letter (pages 2 through 10). FMR's operating income rose 18.6 percent to a record $6.3 billion, while operating expenses rose 8.6 percent to $14.1 billion. 

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