The exchange traded fund universe continues to expand, and the U.S. is seeing some major, overarching themes starting to pop up.
“I think the themes that we’re seeing today or the themes that we’ve been seeing for years now, which is people moving towards keeping things simple, keeping things cheap,” Ben Johnson, Director of Global ETF Research at Morningstar, said at the 2018 Morningstar Invest Conference.
ETF investors and most market participants in general have been gravitating toward low-cost, passive index-based funds like ETFs. The industry is witnessing increased usage from institutions, financial advisors and retail investors.
“We’ve seen fee wars continue to edge ever closer to zero; big fee cuts recently from iShares; a recasting of a lot of SPDR ETFs into their portfolio series, which are uniformly low-cost now. The race to the bottom carries on,” Johnson added.