After graduation, Johnson spent two years at Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., the consulting firm where she met her future husband, Christopher McKown. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1988.
Vanguard, Pimco
She was mentored in her early career at Fidelity by fund manager Harry Lange. In April 1993, she was named to head her first diversified stock fund, the Dividend Growth Fund, which she ran for almost a year, beating the S&P 500 by 11.6 percentage points.
Johnson's promotion comes as Fidelity has trailed money- management rivals such as Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based Vanguard Group Inc., known for its index-based funds, and Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, home of famed bond-picker Bill Gross.
Vanguard, which in 2010 unseated Fidelity as the largest mutual-fund firm, has gathered $80 billion in new client money in the year ended July 31, the most in the industry, followed by Pimco's $31.6 billion, according to research firm Morningstar Inc. Investors withdrew $16.2 billion from Fidelity funds during the same period. Morningstar's numbers include only long-term stock and bond assets and not money-market funds.
Investor Withdrawals
Fidelity's mutual funds have attracted net deposits of $2.6 billion this year through July 31 compared with deposits of $65 billion into Vanguard funds, according to Morningstar. Over the past five years, Fidelity funds have had withdrawals of $45 billion, compared with deposits of $318 billion over the past five years in Vanguard funds, Morningstar said.
Unlike BlackRock Inc., the world's largest asset manager, Fidelity hasn't built a leading presence in alternative investments such as private equity, hedge funds commodities and real estate. The company's institutional unit, Pyramis Global Advisors, has $3.5 billion in alternative assets, compared to BlackRock's $110 billion.
Expecting Changes
"I'm expecting to see changes from Fidelity," Bonnanzio said. "Maybe we'll start to see Fidelity do more than talk about changes and get into markets it has utterly failed to participate in."
Fidelity is currently planning its entry into exchange- traded funds, a product that has grown to about $1.7 trillion as of July 31, according to BlackRock, which became the world's biggest provider of ETFs after acquiring the investment unit from Barclays Plc in 2009.
Fidelity is seeking to be the first major mutual-fund company to introduce ETFs run by active stock pickers by opening a series of products based on its "Select" line of industry- focused equity funds, a person familiar with the plans said last month.
Outside money management, Fidelity is the largest provider of 401(k) retirement plans, offering defined contribution and defined benefit plans to more than 19,000 employers. That unit had $25.2 billion in sales in the first half, a 36 percent increase over last year, according to the firm.
Fidelity's operating income rose 13 percent to $3.33 billion in 2011, and revenue rose by 3.3 percent to $12.8 billion. Investors pulled $36.3 billion from Fidelity funds and other products in the year, down from $49.4 billion in 2010.