ETF Industry Growth is Based on Evolving Investment Ideas

The exchange traded fund universe has quickly expanded and is still in its early stages as innovation continues to drive growth.

ETF Trends publisher Tom Lydon spoke with Ben Johnson, Director of Global ETF Research & Passive Strategies Research at Morningstar, at the Inside ETFs conference that ran Jan. 22-25, 2017 to talk about some of the biggest things going on in the ETF industry.

“What we see is that the ETF tent is getting bigger every year,” Johnson said. “We saw record flows in 2016. We’ve got now more than three trillion dollars globally invested in exchange traded funds.”

In the U.S. markets, there are now 1,998 U.S.-listed ETFs from 103 fund sponsors with $2.784 trillion in assets under management.

With the passive index-based ETF landscape continuing to grow, more are shifting from traditional active strategies into the passive ETFs. However, that does not mean that investors are growing increasingly passive.