INVESTMENTS FLOW DESPITE SCANDALS

The biggest stock-picking fund at BlackRock Inc raised its bet on Facebook Inc in March, a source familiar with the matter said, making the social media company a top 10 equity holding and apparently betting that Facebook's privacy scandal will not weigh on the stock for long.

A person familiar with the matter said the Global Allocation Fund

- run by Dan Chamby, Russ Koesterich, David Clayton and Kent Hogshire - had boosted its Facebook share count. The person, who requested anonymity because BlackRock does not discuss individual stocks, declined to say specifically how many Facebook shares the fund had acquired or when during the month they were purchased.

Facebook and BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager with $6.32 trillion under management, declined to comment.

The increases in Facebook holdings were enough to make the social media company the $36.7 billion fund's sixth largest stock holding at March 30, up 10 spots from where it had been two months earlier, according to the fund's website and Thomson Reuters data. The March disclosures also do not spell out when shares were acquired or how many were bought. Facebook had not recently been listed in the top 10 holdings, a list updated monthly. As of Jan. 31, the date of its most recent detailed filings, the Global Allocation Fund held 1.38 million Facebook shares, making it the No. 16 equity holding valued at about $258 million at that time.

Facebook shares are down more than 10 percent after the New York Times and London's Observer newspaper reported in mid-March that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that worked on U.S.