With 2022 data in from the ASX recently, we were able to dig into the various exchange metrics provided by them and ETF issuers to see how the year played out. You can see more details in the blog article on that here (https://www.etftracker.com.au/post/aussie-etfs-2022-year-in-review).
In this article, we’re diving into Net Inflows (how much money went into or out of ETFs) and we have data going back to 2017 here.
Diving into this though we can take a look at more recently what type of ETFs (active/passive) and categories were either seeing growth or seeing investors move funds out.
All of the following is available at ETFtracker (see here https://tinyurl.com/etftracker or here https://www.etftracker.com.au/)
First up, let’s focus on the last 2 years an we can see in the chart at the bottom of the screenshot below that inflows were less in 2022 than they were in 2021. The top left chart is net inflows over last 2 years where VAS and HYGG are the top of the leaderboard and on the top right it’s performance versus net inflows.
We can use ETFtracker to filter between active and passive and what we see is that passive ETFs (e.g. those that track a benchmark) had positive inflows
But active ETFs had net outflows over the course of 2022
It’s ironic though because active ETFs are those which are enabled to navigate changing market circumstances. We can also see that the category of ETFs that had the outflows in 2022 were the global equity related ones.
Diving into categories, we can see that Australian Equity related ETFs had some net outflows mid-2022
Global Equity (non-Asia, emerging market) had a few months of outflows
Same with Asia
and a big outflow for emerging market equity ETFs in mid 2022 as well
There was a trend higher for Fixed Income ETFs (global and Australian domestic shown here)
Try it out on the ETFtracker app and even see within these categories whether Active or Passive ETFs did better.