U.S.-listed ETFs overall attracted $73 billion of net inflows last month through Aug. 28, more than double the average for August flows over the preceding six years, according to Matthew Bartolini, head of SPDR Americas research at State Street Global Advisors.
August ETF flows from 2018 through 2023 have averaged $32 billion, said Bartolini, who is also a managing director at SSGA.
“Typically, August flows are about $32 billion, which is the lowest out of any other month,” Bartolini said, adding, however, that August 2024 “has bucked the sort of dog-day-of-summer drawdown of flows.”
Asked what has fueled the jump in August ETF flows, he said “part of it’s math … the ETF market’s just bigger.”
Bartolini also pointed to the increasing number of options available to investors within the ETF wrapper.
“Active fixed-income ETFs have broken records already … on a year-to-date basis, and they continue to garner interest,” he said. “You continue to have active equity ETFs coming into the market, more novel ETFs like buffered ETFs are being utilized.”
He also cited low-cost ETFs, “which signals a real expansive use of asset-allocation models.”
Overall, U.S.-listed ETFs have attracted $610 billion of net inflows this year through Aug. 28, which is a “record amount” for any year through August, Bartolini said. The previous record for U.S.-listed ETF net inflows for the first full eight months of a calendar year was set in 2021 with $591 billion of net inflows, he said.
That $610 billion of inflows puts U.S.-listed ETFs overall on pace to likely end 2024 with a record $950 billion of net inflows, Bartolini said. The current record is $909 billion set in 2021, he said.
Assets of U.S.-listed ETFs overall totaled about $9.7 trillion as of Aug. 28, he said. If market returns “remain well-behaved,” U.S.-listed ETFs could end 2024 with $10 trillion in assets, he said.
Deborah Fuhr, managing partner, founder and owner of ETFGI, an independent research and consultancy firm focused on the global ETF industry, agreed with Bartolini that 2024 is likely to be a record-setting year. Barring a significant market correction, “we will see record assets at the end of the year and record full-year net inflows globally, in the U.S., in Europe and in Asia Pacific,” Fuhr said in an Aug. 30 email.
Net inflows into U.S.-listed ETFs totaled about $601 billion this year through Aug. 29, Fuhr said. That’s higher than the previous record for year-to-date net inflows through August, which was set in 2021 at $594.4 billion, according to ETFGI data.
SSGA, the asset management arm of State Street, had $4.42 trillion in assets under management as of June 30. That included nearly $1.4 trillion of ETF AUM.
