A $30 trillion wrapper
By Ian Frisch, New York Times, 6/28/2025
The modern market for exchange-traded funds has enabled retail investors to easily put money into basically anything.
That includes various cryptocurrencies ($IBIT and $ETH), the investment strategies of Congressional Democrats ($NANC), pet-care brands ($PAWZ), and private equity funds with exposure to Elon Musk’ s SpaceX ($XOVR) and OpenAI ($ARKVX)…
E.T.F.s have taken off — growing to encompass over $10 trillion in the U.S. …
Institutional and retail traders flock to E.T.F.s for a handful of reasons: accessibility (anyone with a brokerage account can buy the ticker), favorable tax structures (in-kind redemptions and lower capital-gains distributions), intraday trading (mutual funds trade only at the end of the day) and generally lower fees…
An increasing number of E.T.F.s are actively managed. While many exchange-traded funds, such as $SPY, passively track an index, actively-managed funds, where the basket of stocks tracked by an E.T.F. changes according to an investment strategy, have gained in popularity.
Assets in active E.T.F. products have risen from $171 billion in 2020 to $866 billion in 2024… As of June 2025, active E.T.F.s now account for more than half of all exchange-traded funds… [end quote]
Managers of mutual funds are working on a rule change to make them more competitive with ETFs.
Wendy