Professional ETF investors think actively managed exchange-traded funds will reach $10trn in assets in seven years, according to a new survey.

Brown Brothers Harriman, a US private bank, polled 325 institutional investors, fund and wealth managers in the US, Europe and Greater China for its 2026 Global ETF Investor Survey.

It found 94% believed that active ETFs could grow assets under management (AUM) from $1.9trn at the end of last year to $10trn by 2033, an annual growth rate of 20%.

Deborah Fuhr, managing partner and founder of ETF data provider ETFGI, told BBH the forecast could prove conservative if there was an acceleration in mutual fund to ETF conversions.

“In terms of market forecast I’d looked at going out from our end of November AUM data for 10 years. A 10% growth rate takes you to $4.8trn, 15% takes us to $7.5trn, 20% would take us to $11.5trn, and a 25% growth rate would take us to $17.3trn. We do know that assets invested in active strategies grew by over 50% through the end of November,” she said.

Our view

David Batchelor, senior analyst at QuotedData, said: “Yet more evidence of the march of ETFs, and active ETFs in particular. According to BBH, nearly all of the investors they surveyed plan to increase exposure over the next 12 months, with two-thirds viewing active ETFs as a more attractive approach than passive ETFs. This is a global survey, and what interested me most was that enthusiasm for ETFs in Europe was seemingly comparable to the US, with 82% of investors open to investing in an ETF share class of a mutual fund, versus 86% across the pond. One of the topics we have been exploring is whether the active ETF market in Europe can get anywhere near to the size of its American counterpart; surveys such as this suggest that it might be able to.”

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