Why exchange-traded funds are a 'growth engine' of active management

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Actively managed exchange-traded funds are a growing trend in the investment space.

To that point, investors have pulled money from active mutual funds and sought out actively managed ETFs in recent years. Investors yanked about $2.2 trillion from active mutual funds from 2019 through October 2024, according to Morningstar data. At the same time, they added about $603 billion to active ETFs.

Active ETFs had positive annual inflows from 2019 through 2023 and are on pace for positive inflows in 2024, according to Morningstar. Meanwhile, active mutual funds lost money in all but one year (2021); they shed $344 billion in the first 10 months of 2024.

«We see [active ETFs] as the growth engine of active management,» said Bryan Armour, director of passive strategies research for North America at Morningstar. While acknowledg

«It's still in the early innings,» he said. «But it's been a bright spot in an otherwise cloudy market.»

At a high level, mutual funds and ETFs are similar.

They are legal structures that hold investor assets. But investors have gravitated toward ETFs in recent years due to cost benefits they generally enjoy relative to mutual funds, experts said.

Fund managers who use active management are actively selecting stocks, bonds or other securities that they expect to outperform a market benchmark.

This active management generally costs more than passive investing.

Passive investing, used in index funds, doesn't require as much hands-on work from money managers, who basically replicate the returns of a market benchmark like the S&P 500 U.S. stock index. Their fees are generally lower as a result.

Active mutual funds and ETFs had an average asset-weighted expense ratio of 0.59% in 2023, versus