US exchange-traded funds have taken in about $1.43 trillion so far in 2026, against a full-year record of roughly $1.5 trillion set last year. Bond ETFs account for $440 billion of it, which is a record on its own.
Todd Rosenbluth called fixed income the story of the year back in January, when the argument for it was a Federal Reserve that has since started raising rates rather than cutting them.
"So we crossed $440 billion last week. That is now a new record for fixed income flows that beat last year."
Rosenbluth runs research at VettaFi, the ETF data and index business that has just closed its acquisition of Research Affiliates, and the flow numbers he reads out are the ones the industry quotes back to itself.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 11 calls that matter.
👤 Guest: Todd Rosenbluth, Head of Research at VettaFi, who tracks ETF flows, launches and industry consolidation
🎙️ Host: Nate Geraci, President of OTR Media and of the investment advisory firm NovaDius Wealth Management
🧩 Other segments: Brian Casey, CEO of Westwood Holdings Group
📰 Published: 16 September 2026 on YouTube
🔴 YouTube | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ length not available
Key Takeaways
Bond ETFs have taken in a record $440B this year, and the fourth quarter is usually the strongest
Trailing one-year inflows are almost $2.1 trillion, and August alone was about $180 billion
Cheaper copycats have not dented the Nasdaq-100 incumbent: it took $22B of net inflows anyway
The equal-weighted S&P 500 fund is outperforming the market-cap-weighted index, with $14B of inflows behind it
One issuer launched nearly 200 ETFs this year; 193 of them hold $300M between them
Rosenbluth's line is that investors, not commentators, are the ones ignoring the products
Every recent acquisition maps onto a category that was already taking in money
Options income, Treasury ladders and fundamentally weighted indexes, in that order
Value's year depends entirely on which value index you bought
One large-cap value benchmark is beating its parent by about 1,000 basis points; another is roughly in line
International beating the US is a South Korea question, not an international question
Only about five firms have launched an ETF share class, against roughly 90 with approval
1. $1.5T and Counting
Nate Geraci opened the industry round-up where he usually does, on flows, and the number is on course to break last year's record with a quarter of the year left.
Inflows are nearing $1.5 trillion for 2026 against a record of right at $1.5 trillion last year, Geraci said, with more than three months still to run.
Rosenbluth's own figure was slightly lower: "So, $1.5 trillion. We're actually at 1.43, I think, the last time I took a closer look." He expects the record to fall by the end of September.
The seasonal argument is that the fourth quarter is the strongest stretch of the year. Investors position for the year ahead, he said, and use the window to sell out of mutual fund strategies that have not performed.
He went further on where the calendar year ends up: "It seems like a layup that we're going to cross over two trillion, barring some huge setback in the market." Trailing one-year inflows are almost $2.1 trillion on his numbers.
"And you look in August, we just had a massive about 180 billion in inflows. So, it's just the numbers are staggering."
2. A Record Year for Bonds
The fixed income record is the one Rosenbluth flagged as the surprise, and it is the call Geraci credited him with making in January.
"So we crossed $440 billion last week. That is now a new record for fixed income flows that beat last year." The data is FactSet's, which VettaFi uses.
He was recording the morning of the Federal Reserve decision, and said listeners would know the outcome before either of them did.
Rosenbluth's own framing of the category is that it is a hard sell: "I know fixed income tends to be boring. People are probably getting ready to fall asleep as I'm trying to do this with as much enthusiasm as possible." An ultrashort bond fund has led the charge, he said, and several corporate, aggregate and international bond funds have each taken in more than $10 billion this year.
Geraci's reply was that he was not falling asleep, because Rosenbluth had called this in early January, and that the credit would be a running theme of the conversation.
3. What the Leaderboard Says
Rosenbluth picked three stories out of the top of the flows table, with the caveat that he was not trying to highlight individual funds.
The first is that the low-cost challengers to the Nasdaq-100 incumbent have not worked. Both iShares and State Street launched cheaper competitors, and the incumbent still took in the money: "QQQM has $22 billion of net inflows. It is among the most popular ETFs." Some of that, he said, is people wanting Nasdaq exposure and going with what they know.
The second is the equal-weighted S&P 500 fund, which has taken $14 billion and is beating the market-cap-weighted index. For years, he said, he and Geraci had discussed the market needing to broaden out and investors needing to believe it would. No fund is a better example than this one, where each of the 500 companies gets roughly 0.2% of the portfolio.
"So that just proves that those assets that went in have been appropriate."
The third is that active equity is working in three distinct styles at once, not one. He named the quantitative, low-cost strategic funds from Avantis, part of American Century; the fundamentally oriented products from Capital Group and iShares; and the options-based income funds from JPMorgan and from Neos, which Goldman Sachs is buying. What interests him is that all three are working rather than one of them.
4. Still the Usual Suspects
Geraci took the other side, and the disagreement is the best exchange in the segment.
His point is that for all the talk about concentration risk, the money is still going into market-cap-weighted large-cap US equity funds. The top of the leaderboard, he said, is littered with all the usual suspects.
"So while RSP is doing well and there's some other examples of that I think it bears mentioning even though everybody sees this that the top of the leaderboard is still the usual suspects."
"And we always say, money talks, right? That where investors put their hard-earned dollars trumps any sort of market narrative." Investors, on his reading, are not dissuaded by the concerns about top-heavy indexes and valuations that get aired constantly.
Rosenbluth agreed and drew the opposite conclusion from it: the flows are evidence that new money is arriving rather than existing money moving. "But the significant flows that we're seeing here to me is a sign that this is net new people who are coming into the space."
Part of that is a low-cost S&P 500 fund being selected for the Trump accounts, he said, but many of the new buyers have nothing to do with that scheme. "That means that this snowball has still has a lot of ground to pick up."
Geraci asked whether the leaderboard ever changes. Rosenbluth's answer was that funds do periodically break out — ProShares' money market ETF is a new entrant showing up on it — but "So there is still room for new firms to be among the most popular ETFs, but lowcost S&P 500 broad equity, broad fixed income products are still going to likely be towards the top of the leaderboard in up and down markets."
5. The M&A Wave
Geraci listed the year's deals: Goldman Sachs closing on Innovator and then announcing Neos, T. Rowe Price buying F/m Investments, Victory Capital agreeing to acquire First Eagle, and VettaFi itself closing on Research Affiliates.
Rosenbluth's observation is that the deals track the flows exactly. Each acquisition is in a category that was already taking in money.
Options-based strategies are popular, which is what the Innovator and Neos deals buy: bringing Neos in, he said, will make Goldman Sachs a leading provider of options-based ETFs offering downside protection and enhanced income.
Fixed income is the record category, and F/m has been a bright spot in it, with success in single-Treasury ETFs and in rolling them forward. That expertise goes to T. Rowe Price.
The market broadening out fits the Research Affiliates deal, whose indexes sit behind fundamentally weighted strategies from Schwab, Invesco and PIMCO.
Rosenbluth also flagged a small one: Amplify buying a two-ETF shop. Deals are happening at both ends of the size range.
Geraci's own framework is two words: "I keep saying, Todd, that these deals come down to distribution and differentiation" — the large acquirers have the distribution, the targets have the differentiated products, and combining the two makes sense.
"And the other, piece to that is that if you look at the firms being acquired, they're typically clocking in at a higher fee rate, too." That, he said, is where to look for the next targets: differentiated products at a higher price point, which usually go together.
On Victory Capital, Rosenbluth said his recent conversation with its head of ETFs predated the First Eagle deal and was mostly about the free cash flow suite. The flagship fund is three years old and holds $11 billion; a growth version has crossed $1 billion and a small-cap version is approaching it, for about $13 billion across the range. His point is that index products still produce success stories, not only active ones.
6. Who Gets Bought Next
Geraci asked which firms look like targets and which should be buying.
Rosenbluth named Bond Bloxx as the obvious follow-on to the F/m deal, on the reasoning that it has similar success in targeted fixed income products and a team of long-standing industry experts who would be valuable inside a firm without that ETF depth.
Amplify is his second, as a firm having success with options-based products and with thematic funds, including the suite it acquired from ETFMG.
On the buying side he named Franklin Templeton, which has made acquisitions repeatedly — Legg Mason and Putnam, both mostly mutual funds with a little ETF business — and which he thinks wants to be larger still.
"And then lastly, it's hard to see what's going on at Goldman Sachs with Brian Lake, a former JPMorgan head of ETFs, and not wonder if JPMorgan might be looking to get even larger inorganically as well." Growing inorganically means growing by acquisition.
Geraci added Defiance, GraniteShares and Simplify, and said Roundhill had been on his list at the start of the year but is doing too well to sell.
His wild card is a crypto ETF issuer: "I do think a crypto ETF issuer could be attractive because if you have a larger asset manager who doesn't have any crypto ETF presence, that's not necessarily an easy thing to build."
Rosenbluth's counter is that the more likely outcome in crypto is consolidation among the specialists rather than acquisition by a large manager. The leaders in crypto ETFs are iShares and Fidelity, he said, not the crypto-native firms, and some of those firms have already cut staff after building for a level of success that did not arrive. "So, we could see firms come together so that they get they bring those experts together and they benefit from a collective scale instead of competing against one another."
Geraci agreed, and said the frenzy at the category's launch produced more competitors than the category could support. Most are still alive, he said, but at the bottom of the spot bitcoin or spot ether rankings, joining forces to scale up on assets and resources may make sense.
7. FlexShares Rebrands
A smaller item, which Geraci raised mostly as a public service announcement.
FlexShares has rebranded its whole ETF lineup under the Northern Trust label — an issuer with nearly $30 billion in assets changing its name.
Rosenbluth's reassurance for holders is that the tickers are unchanged; only the name at the front has moved.
He credited the firm's ETF head, Dave Abner, and noted Northern Trust is an established asset manager building out its fixed income range, including additions to its target-date bond ladder lineup earlier this year.
Geraci raised an interview Abner gave in which he argued that putting "shares" in an ETF's name is now outdated. It used to tell an investor what they were buying; with ETFs everywhere, it no longer does. Invesco dropped its PowerShares brand for the same reason.
8. 193 ETFs, $300M
The sharpest numbers in the segment are about an issuer that has flooded the market with launches this year.
Geraci's position is that the industry is not taking the firm seriously, and that it should. He pointed to two senior hires: a chief investment strategist who came over from WisdomTree, and a vice president of financial services with a large social media following.
Rosenbluth said the hires move him, but the asset numbers do not. "They have more than half their assets in one ETF."
"According to the data that I last saw, the other 193 ETFs have a combined 300 million in assets."
"Now said most bluntly, it is hard to gather assets in the ETF industry." It is harder with new products, he said, and the firm is coming to market with a great many of them.
"It's less that we in the punditry aren't taking them serious is that investors haven't put money to work into them."
Geraci's reply is that the firm is competing on fees, particularly in leveraged ETFs, but that the problem it has to solve is distribution. "Distribution is king in the ETF space." However many products an issuer launches, and however good they are, an unfamiliar brand nobody knows about will struggle to find an audience.
Both agreed the commitment is real rather than opportunistic. Rosenbluth's version is that the hires make the firm a more legitimate player, and that the ETF language has a certain rhythm to it that its spokespeople now have.
9. Value Isn't One Thing
Geraci asked Rosenbluth for the stories he is watching through year-end, since he is not booked back on the show until December.
The first is that the value-is-back narrative only holds for some value indexes. A large-cap value benchmark tracking the Russell 1000 is beating its parent index by about 1,000 basis points; the S&P 500 value equivalent is in line with, or slightly behind, the S&P 500 itself.
"So value isn't value to everybody."
The Fed raising rates is likely to be supportive of value, he said, which makes the year-end question whether the gap between the two value indexes narrows or persists.
Geraci's addition is that value and international are both places investors have been burned for a long time, and that the lesson from both is the same: look at what the fund actually holds.
10. It Depends on Korea
The second year-end story is international, and Rosenbluth's point is that the headline comparison is decided by one country.
A Vanguard developed-markets fund is comfortably ahead of the S&P 500 this year. An iShares core developed-markets fund is roughly in line with it.
The difference is South Korea, which the Vanguard fund holds and the iShares one does not, and which has been at or near the top of the performance table.
Geraci said the same split runs through emerging markets in reverse: an iShares core emerging-markets fund is well ahead of the Vanguard equivalent, because there the iShares product holds South Korea and the Vanguard one does not.
His practical warning is about mixing fund families when building a portfolio. It is fine to do, he said, as long as you look at what is inside each fund.
11. Share Classes Stalled
The third story is the one the industry expected to define 2026 and has not.
Roughly five firms have actually launched an ETF share class of an existing mutual fund — Rosenbluth named Dimensional, Thornburg, Fidelity and Hotchkis & Wiley among them — against about 90 firms with approval or near-approval.
"What are they waiting for? Are they going to come to market? I know what they're waiting for. They're waiting to see if it works and if there is investor demand for it."
His year-end marker is deliberately low: "I think we will see more than 10 firms that have entered in 2026." Firms tend to act in December, he said, so that they start 2027 with a track record.
Geraci conceded the call. He had been positive on share classes and Rosenbluth had been more conservative about the pace of the rollout, and the rollout has been slow.
His reasoning is that the wrapper does not fix the underlying problem. A share class is positive for the industry, he said, but it does not solve distribution or performance, and it will not turn an issuer into a success on its own.
Rosenbluth's closing line, after a segment in which Geraci credited him with three correct calls: "What do we have? We had three things that you got right. It's only fair that I got one of them."
Bonus Insights
The two opened on the fact that the New York Giants and the Kansas City Chiefs had the same record, which Rosenbluth did not expect to last.
Geraci trailed the following week's episode with Rob Arnott and VettaFi's president, on the Research Affiliates acquisition. Rosenbluth declined to say much about the deal on the grounds that it would step on his own management's remarks.
Rosenbluth's bottom line is that the ETF industry's records, its acquisitions and its disappointments all point the same way: money keeps arriving in the cheapest, broadest products, the firms being bought are the ones selling something those products do not, and a launch on its own buys an issuer nothing.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
VettaFi (Rosenbluth's firm, which supplies the flows data he quotes and has just closed its acquisition of Research Affiliates)
Invesco (Owner of both the Nasdaq-100 fund that took $22B despite cheaper competition and the equal-weighted S&P 500 fund that has taken $14B and is beating the index)
iShares and State Street (Launched the lower-cost Nasdaq-100 competitors that have not displaced the incumbent; iShares is also a leader in crypto ETFs)
Goldman Sachs (Closed on Innovator and is buying Neos, which Rosenbluth says will make it a leading provider of options-based ETFs)
T. Rowe Price (Buying F/m Investments for its single-Treasury ETF expertise)
Victory Capital (Acquiring First Eagle; its free cash flow ETF range holds about $13 billion across large cap, growth, small cap and international)
Avantis Investors and Capital Group (Two of the three flavors of active equity Rosenbluth says are working at once — quantitative and low-cost, and fundamentally oriented)
JPMorgan Asset Management (Its options-income ETF is the third flavor; Rosenbluth wonders whether the firm buys its way larger after losing an ETF head to Goldman Sachs)
ProShares (Its money market ETF is his example of a new entrant breaking into the flows leaderboard)
Northern Trust (Has folded the FlexShares lineup, nearly $30 billion in assets, under its own name; the tickers are unchanged)
Amplify ETFs and Bond Bloxx (Rosenbluth's two most likely acquisition targets — options-based and thematic products in one case, targeted fixed income in the other)
Franklin Templeton (His pick on the buying side, having already absorbed Legg Mason and Putnam)
Fidelity and Dimensional (Among the handful of firms that have actually launched an ETF share class; Fidelity is also a crypto ETF leader)
Bitwise (Geraci's wild-card acquisition target, and the firm Rosenbluth believes announced a staff reduction)
Roundhill, Defiance ETFs and GraniteShares (Geraci's other candidate targets; he thinks Roundhill is doing too well to sell)
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