The ETF industry has seen explosive growth in terms of both AUM and launches thanks to unique strategies, novel concepts, transparency, diversification benefits, enhanced tax competence, less turnover and low cost. In fact, the industry has gathered more than $600 billion in new assets in the first 11 months of 2017. This is up 53.6% from net inflows for the whole of 2016 and almost double the inflows of $326 billion seen during the 11 months of last year.
With this, assets under management in global ETFs rose to a new record $4.7 trillion at the end of November from $3.6 trillion at the end of last year. About 71% ($424 billion) of total inflows came from equity ETFs. Coming to issuers, BlackRock and Vanguard are dominating the industry this year, having gathered $239 billion and $137.1 billion in AUM, respectively.
Inside The Boom
The growth was mainly driven by an astounding rally in the stock market since Trump’s victory last year that has raised the appeal for plain vanilla and passive investing. Additionally, low cost has been the biggest crowd puller to the ETF world.
This is especially true as the top three asset gatherers of 2017 are plain-vanilla ETFs with lower expense ratios, per etf.com. iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV – Free Report) accumulated nearly $31.7 billion in its assets base, followed by $20.1 billion for iShares Core MSCI EAFE ETF (IEFA) and $16.3 billion for Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets ETF (VEA – Free Report) . These have expense ratios of 0.04%, 0.08% and 0.07%, respectively. IVV has gained 21% while IEFA and VEA have returned little higher at around 25% this year.
Additionally, the rise in “thematic investing” and the craze for “smart beta” are leading to staggering growth. This is because many investors are interested in highly specialized theme or niche investing, focusing on a narrow corner of the market rather than broad sectors. On the other hand, the smart beta strategy helps to capture market inefficiencies in a transparent way by adding extra metrics like dividends, volatility, revenue, earnings, momentum, equal weight and other fundamental factors to the market cap or rules-based indices.
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