Given the pervasive coverage this week of Larry Fink's $23.9-million 2014 payday, you could be forgiven for thinking that the BlackRock [profile] chief is grossly overpaid. Indeed, a trade publication's new poll has 70 percent of fundsters agreeing that top executives' pay is out of whack in the industry. Yet if you compare CEO pay to profits or assets under management, the story looks very different ... and very varied.

MFWire dug through the most-recent available (2014 in many cases, but 2013 or fiscal 2014 in some) CEO compensation data from proxy filings and the like filed by 19 publicly-traded mutual fund shops who collectively managed a little more than $10 trillion in AUM. MFWire then pulled in the shops' AUM and net income figures (corresponding to the compensation period in question), and compared those figures to the compensation figures. The results are in the table below.

To sum up the table, yes, Fink's compensation ($23.9 million) is higher than that for most of the other CEOs on the list, save Mario Gabelli ($85 million in 2013) of Gamco [profile]. Yet when you translate CEO compensation into a percentage of the firm's net income, Fink is actually the second-most underpaid CEO on the list, behind only Greg Johnson of Franklin Templeton [profile].

If you're still thinking that Fink or any of the others on this list earns too much, remember this: in November, Bloomberg reported that Bill Gross (since departed to Janus) earned a $290-million bonus from Pimco in 2013. That's more than the $243.8 million that these 19 CEOs earned combined.

On the other hand, retail pays a lot less. Wal-Mart CEO Doug McMillon earned $26 million last year, while the retail giant earned $16 billion. That pay level translates into 0.163 percent of Wal-mart's net income, a rate 4.44 times lower than Fink.

CEO Compensation For Publicly Traded Mutual Fund Firms
Stock Symbol	CEO (Fund Firm)	Total CEO Comp ($MM)	Net Income(Loss) ($MM)	CEO comp as a % of net income
APAM	Eric Colson (Artisan Partners)	6.68	69.6	9.6
AB	Peter Kraus (AllianceBernstein)	6.79	186	3.65
AMG	Sean Healey (Affiliated Managers Group) 1	20	361	5.55
BLK	Larry Fink (BlackRock)	23.9	3,290	0.724
CLMS	John Calamos (Calamos)	3.93	13.6	29
CNS	Robert Steers (Cohen & Steers)	3	75.5	3.97
EV	Tom Faust (Eaton Vance) 2	11.2	321	3.5
FII	Chris Donahue (Federated)	3.66	149	2.45
BEN	Greg Johnson (Franklin Templeton) 2	15.8	2,380	0.663
GBL	Mario Gabelli (Gamco) 1	85	117	72.5
HNNA	Neil Hennessy (Hennessy) 2	2.44	7.7	31.7
IVZ	Martin Flanagan (Invesco)	16	1,090	1.46
JNS	Dick Weil (Janus)	8.15	155	5.24
LM	Joe Sullivan (Legg Mason) 2	9.5	285	3.34
MN	Patrick Cunningham (Manning & Napier) 1, 3	6.04	2.66	227
TROW	Jamie Kennedy (T. Rowe Price)	8.9	1,200	0.742
GROW	Frank Holmes (U.S. Global Investors) 2	0.765	-0.96	NA
VRTS	George Aylward (Virtus)	7.06	97	7.28
WETF	Jonathan Steinberg (WisdomTree) 1	4.97	51.5	9.64
	Total	243.8	9,851	2.5
	Mean	12.8		23.2
	Median	7.1		4.6
Source: All based on proxy filings and annual reports for calendar year 2014 filed with the SEC, except 1where 2013 data or 2fiscal 2014 data was the most recent available.

Bloomberg, InvestmentNews, and the Wall Street Journal were some of the publications that highlighted Fink's pay.

³A note on Manning and Napier's numbers: Manning reports two different net income figures, which lead to dramatically different estimations CEO-comp-as-a-percentage-of-net-income. In the table above, MFWire used Manning's 2013 "net income ... attributable to Manning & Napier, Inc." of $2.656 million, which translates its CEO's compensation into 227 percent of net income. Yet Manning also reports "Net income (loss) attributable to controlling and noncontrolling interests", $76.941 million for 2013, and that translates its CEO comp into 7.85 percent of net income. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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