Fidelity Investments history

Tsai began running the Fidelity Capital Fund in 1957, buying speculative stocks like Polaroid and Xerox.

In 1962 the company established the Magellan Fund, which eventually became the largest mutual fund in the world.

Tsai left Fidelity in 1965, when Johnson reportedly told him that he planned to turn the company over to his son.

In addition, it formed Fidelity Service Company in 1969 to service customer accounts in-house, one of the first fund groups to do so.

Ned Johnson succeeded his father as president of Fidelity Investments in 1972, around the time that the market began to take a turn for the worse and investors began to abandon stocks and equity funds and return to the security of savings accounts.

In 1973 Johnson began to integrate the company vertically by taking over back-office account-processing functions from banks that handled the job for most mutual funds.

Consequently, in 1974 he established Fidelity Daily Income Trust (FIDIT), the first money market fund to offer check writing, a revolutionary—and instantly successful—idea.

Ned became the President and CEO of Fidelity Investments in 1977 when his father retired.

In 1979, Fidelity Institutional Services was formed to manage relationships with corporate clients.

By 1986, Fidelity had 2,800 employees, 104 mutual funds, $50 billion in assets under management, and more than two million customers—400,000 of them in the $4 billion Magellan Fund.

Because Lynch did not invest heavily in conservative stocks and kept very little liquid capital, the Magellan Fund was hard hit by the crash that shook Wall Street on October 19, 1987.

In 1988, the year following the crash, Fidelity’s revenues were down a quarter and profits were 70% lower.

In 1989, with more than $80 billion in assets under management, the firm had more than 9% of the entire mutual fund industry.

The fund was established in 1991, later growing to become the largest charitable organization by donations from the public.

Plymouth Funds, launched and sold exclusively through broker-dealers, is renamed Fidelity Advisor Funds in 1992.

In 1993, the company set up its European off-shore development center as Fidelity Investments Ireland and opened up offices in Galway and Dublin that today employ over 1,000 executives.

Several of its divisions suffered serious setbacks in high-risk bond investments such as emerging-nation debt and derivative securities when the peso nosedived in December 1994.

In January 1995 Thomas J. Steffanci, head of the Fixed-Income unit, resigned, followed by Robert Citrone, manager of Fidelity's prominent emerging markets segment.

As Fidelity approached its 50th anniversary in 1996, the third generation of the Johnson family, 34-year-old Abby Johnson, a director of the FMR Corp. and manager of Fidelity's OTC Portfolio (with assets nearing $2 billion), had clearly proven herself as an investment manager on the move.

In an effort to increase its global impact, Fidelity Investments, in 2004, also established a major presence in India with a back-office focused set-up in Mumbai (India) which employs over 4,000 executives.

In 2007, Fidelity Investments rebranded most of its portfolio holdings and private equity investments services under ‘Devonshire Investors’ to avoid the risk of confusion with its other consumer-based mutual funds and finance services.

In 2009, FMR opened up offices in Tokyo and Hong Kong which increased their impact in the Asian market.

He served in these positions until 2014, when his daughter, Abby Johnson, took over the company’s leadership.

Fidelity Investments offers 401(K) retirement plan services through its subsidiary Fidelity Personal, Workplace and Institutional Services (PWIS). The subsidiary listed over $1.4 trillion in assets under administration and $32 billion in defined contribution assets as of September 30, 2015.

In a watershed moment for blockchain, Abby Johnson speaks about blockchain technology’s potential benefits at Consensus 2017, the largest blockchain conference in the United States

Abby owns an estimated 24.5% of the company’s stock and lists a net worth of $20 billion as of January 2018.