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In 2010, the New York-based company's stock has been a laggard, down as much as 40 percent on concerns about client outflows in the first half of the year.

Shares started to turn around in September when the company's chief executive, Laurence Fink, told a Barclays Capital financial services conference he was seeing much stronger inflows.

BlackRock shares are now down 24 percent for the year, compared with the 4 percent that the Dow Jones U.S. Asset Manager Index .DJUSAG has fallen in the same period.

"The quarter should be pretty good," said Jason Weyeneth, an analyst at Sterne, Agee & Leach, who follows the company.

After the company's blockbuster acquisition of Barclays Global Investors and its iShares exchange-traded-fund business nearly a year ago, investors pared back their growth expectations for the company, as they wondered whether a $3.2 trillion asset manager could realistically grow much larger.

"You saw the stock underperform as there was obviously some confusion, some disappointment, and some surprise around deal-related attrition," Weyeneth added. "But the net flows should be much better successively."

A September stock market rally probably also helped the company, although it may have also raised investors' expectations for BlackRock and other asset managers, which tend to have heavy exposure to equities.

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S, on average, expect BlackRock to earn $2.46 per share for the third quarter, compared with the adjusted $2.37 per share it reported in the second quarter.

Analysts have increased their earnings estimates by 5.1 percent for the company since October 4, according to Thomson Reuters Starmine.

William Katz, an analyst at Citigroup who follows asset managers, said in a note to clients earlier this month that he would expect assets under management at BlackRock to increase by 9 percent from the previous quarter, helped by the strong inflows Fink spoke about.

The company, however, has also previously warned that some big clients were planning to take money out of BlackRock in the third quarter, as they wanted to redistribute assets as a result of the Barclays deal.

For BlackRock, the third quarter could be the beginning of stronger momentum in inflows going forward, analysts said.

Institutional investors, particularly pension funds, have been expected to boost the amount of money allocated to managers this year, as low interest rates have made it difficult to meet their portfolios' return expectations.

"Pension funds actually funding new mandates, but it takes a little while before changes in managers actually start to show up in results," Weyeneth said.

BlackRock shares were trading off 1.4 percent at $174 per share on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday ahead of its earnings report.

(Reporting by Emily Chasan; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)