Assets in U.S.-listed exchange-traded funds and exchange-traded products surpassed $1 trillion for the first time, reaching $1.027 trillion on Dec. 16, BlackRock said.
On that date, there were 894 ETFs with assets of $887.2 billion, up from 772 ETFs with assets of $705.5 billion a year earlier. At Dec. 16, there were 185 ETPs with assets of $115.5 billion, up from 142 ETPs with assets of $88.1 billion. Year-to-date, 171 new ETFs have been launched with another 828 ETFs in the pipeline.
Retail and institutional investors are driving the growth in the products, said Deborah Fuhr, global head of ETF research and implementation strategy at BlackRock. "Increasingly, both retail and institutional investors are building global, multiasset portfolios that are designed to capture the performance of key benchmarks for attractive market sectors — an application for which ETFs and ETPs are particularly well suited," Fuhr said.
