The resurgence of actively managed strategies will impact most corners of BlackRock's business, including its iShares ETFs.
Kristy Akullian, senior iShares investment strategist at BlackRock, said she thinks investors hear "active" and automatically think that has to mean securities selection.
"ETFs are the Swiss Army knife of portfolios," she said at the press briefing. "There's so many ways that they're used, and many of those ways are reflections of active decisions."
While ETFs were originally "just these sort of low-cost building blocks" used mostly by retail investors to assemble portfolios, Akullian pointed to a "sea change in what investors use ETFs to achieve" over roughly the past five years.
"Over the last kind of five years or so, we've seen a huge uptick in institutional adoption, so we've seen institutions using ETFs within active and alpha-seeking strategies and primarily for liquidity," she said. "I think what we've seen in the last couple years even is just a real proliferation of strategies and the types of funds that are offered, and the types of investors who use them."
So, in addition to the buy-and-hold retail investor, "we also obviously see a really large use case for institutional investors and also even just the more active retail community that's sort of emerged over the last few years," Akullian said.
She cited some examples of "where and how" investors are using ETFs now.
"We've seen investors get a lot more granular within geographic exposures," she said. "This year we saw the most flows to Japan-focused ETFs since 2015 and the most flows to India-focused funds since 2014."
Akullian said she believes that reflects "kind of a wider rotation from broad emerging markets or developed markets and into a more kind of targeted regional or country exposure," she said.