US investors go large on domestic equities while the rest of the world backpedals   Sentiment is fickle, particularly so regarding US equities at the moment. As the year turned, the IMF had revised US growth expectations upward and investors were looking forward to the wind in their sails, with returns elevated by tax cuts and deregulation promised by the new administration. As I write, the S&P 500 is down almost 5%, posting its worst quarterly performance since 2022. How are fund investors responding? In aggregate, global fund flow data doesn’t show a rush for the exits—so far. Over Q4

When the patent of Vanguard on ETF share classes expired on May 16, 2023, market observers and participants expected a significant number of new ETFs which are actual share classes of existing mutual funds since the promoters of active managed mutual funds may want to attract investors who are only using ETFs in their portfolios. Opposite to this expectation, the promoters of mutual funds in Europe have been rather shy in using this new feature to enhance their fund distribution strategies. Nevertheless, the use cases and advantages for ETF share classes are still valid and a further increase of the

Despite the growth of the European ETF industry, there is one question which drives the discussions of market observers. Is there a consolidation ahead in the European ETF industry? This question seems to be a bit odd given the growth in assets under management and the overall level of estimated net inflows over the year 2024, as well as the previous years. On the other hand, the estimated net inflows were quite concentrated. This means that only a limited number of ETFs, and as a result a small number of promoters, were able to gather a significant share of these

Using the Lipper Leaders scoring system to analyse the best-performing funds in the IA Sterling Strategic Bond sector.   Sterling Strategic Bond allows investors, should they wish, to outsource the bond portion of their portfolios to one manager. If you don’t fancy the prospect of deciding whether to be long or short duration (a bond portfolio’s sensitivity to interest rate changes), where to be positioned between government, corporate investment grade or high yield debt, local currency or hard currency in emerging markets, or whether to be in emerging markets at all—well, this could be the solution. It is certainly a

The assets under management in the European ETF industry are highly concentrated at the classification level. Even as one would expect that the AUM are concentrated at the classification level since this reflects the asset allocation views of the investors—which are in general rather streamlined than widely diverging—the level of concentration might be surprising. ETFs classified as Equity U.S. held 26.83% of the overall assets under management at the end of December 2024. The second largest classification, Equity Global, held 18.09% of the overall AUM and Equity Emerging Markets Global held 4.26%. Given the fact that Equity U.S. and Equity

Investors, market observers, and regulators always raise questions about the competitiveness of the European ETF industry since assets under management seem to be concentrated among a few ETF promoters. Generally speaking, I would agree with the statement that one needs to be concerned if a few players are dominating a market, but not when it comes to the European ETF industry. Graph 1 shows that the European ETF industry is highly concentrated at the promoter level since the 10-top promoters in Europe held between 93.52% (June 30, 2023) and 95.06% (December 31, 2024) of the overall assets under management in

Asset class view UK mutual funds and ETFs saw outflows of £6.76bn over February (-£5.12bn ex-MMFs). Equities saw the largest redemptions (-£3.48bn). Active v passive The active-to-passive bond rotation, which has been a feature of the market since 2021, reversed. Some £3.73bn was redeemed from passive bond funds, while their active peers took £1.49bn. Classifications Equity Global was the top-selling classification for the month, netting £1.87bn (£1.18bn active/£689m passive). UK equity funds suffered redemptions of £2.77bn over the month. Sustainable fund flows Sustainable funds netted a total of £367m for the month, conventional funds lost £8.26bn. MMFs were the most

February 2025 was another month with strong inflows for the global ETF industry. These inflows occurred in a volatile market environment in which investors around the globe acted nervous over any political and economic news. Investor sentiment was impacted by the discussions around tariffs imposed by the U.S. president and potential tit-for-tat reactions from the markets which are the targets of the new tariffs. That said, the tariffs are seen as a kind of trade war between the U.S. and the rest of the world by some market observers. When it comes to this, investors were concerned about a political

February 2025 was another month with strong inflows (+€33.8 bn) for the European ETF industry. These flows were way above the rolling 12-month average (€23.5 bn) and might be an indicator that the European ETF industry is set to continue to grow above average over the course of 2025. In fact, if the European ETF industry is able to maintain net inflows at the same level for January and February for the rest of the year, it would hit an all-time high for annual inflows on a totally different level than before. The inflows in the European ETF industry for

In this issue of LSEG Lipper’s Global Mutual Funds & Exchange-Traded Products Snapshot, we feature a summary of total net assets (TNA) and estimated net flows (ENF) for global responsible investments conventional funds and exchange-traded products for February 2025.   Loading

In this issue of LSEG Lipper’s US Mutual Funds & Exchange-Traded Products Snapshot, we feature a summary of total net assets (TNA) and estimated net flows (ENF) for responsible investments conventional funds and exchange-traded products for February 2025.   Loading

In this issue of LSEG Lipper’s US Mutual Funds & Exchange-Traded Products Snapshot, we feature a summary of total net assets (TNA) and estimated net flows (ENF) for US conventional funds and exchange-traded products for February 2025.   Loading