| | Good morning and happy Monday. Magic mirror on the wall, who's the most active ETF manager of them all? If Jamie Dimon were posing the question, the enchanted mirror would have to respond, "Your JPMorgan Asset Management is the most active of all." (OK, we'll concede the image of a finance company may not be as memorable as that of a fairytale princess or her villainous stepmother.) Nonetheless, JPMorgan recently surpassed Dimensional Fund Advisors in the most assets under management among active ETFs globally. According to a report last week in Bloomberg, JPMorgan reached $257 billion, just edging out Dimensional's $255 billion. What's fair is fair. | | | | | | | | One doesn't need a boatload of cash or a "Members Only" jacket to get into private equity; an ETF will do the job … sort of. Private fund assets have roughly tripled over the past 10 years, outpacing the over 2X growth rate of the public market, a recent report by Morningstar found. As companies stay private for longer and reach incredible valuations, there has been plenty of interest in how fund managers can give their customers a taste. There has been a steady buildout of interval funds, and other semi-liquid products, and the trend has even bled into the highly liquid category of exchange-traded funds. "The ETF space is obviously more limited, because you don't have the same structural protections to own private assets as some of those other wrappers," said Bryan Armour, director of ETF and passive strategies research for North America at Morningstar. "You can offer exposure to private assets — it just can't be a really substantial portion of the portfolio." Conditions May Vary On that point, the small number of ETFs in the category have offered relatively small allocations to private markets, a consequence of the SEC's 15% limit on illiquid holdings. Still, for retail investors who couldn't otherwise access private credit or private equity, that may be enough. State Street Investment Management has sought to tap into that demand, last year adding two private credit funds: the SPDR SSGA IG Public & Private Credit ETF (PRIV) and the State Street Short Duration IG Public & Private Credit ETF (PRSD). Those products have about 20% exposure to private credit, getting around the 15% limit by having Apollo provide liquidity. Both outperformed their benchmarks last year, and they should be considered core bond holdings rather than just private-credit vehicles, the company has said. Private equity is probably a more alluring category for retail investors than private credit, Armour said. But there are few ETFs with private equity holdings, and there are some important considerations for investors thinking about those, he noted. For example: - The $1.6 billion ERShares Private-Public Crossover ETF (XOVR), has 10% of its assets in SpaceX, through a special-purpose vehicle. That fund received a lot of attention (and flows) last year, as it is perhaps the only US ETF with SpaceX exposure. But it's unclear how ERShares values the SpaceX holdings, and special-purpose vehicles can have high fees that don't necessarily need to be disclosed to ETF investors, Armour noted. ERShares did not respond to a request for comment.
- The $90 million Baron First Principles ETF (RONB) is different, in that it holds Elon Musk's xAI directly, Armour said. However, the issue of private-equity valuation remains. That ETF has less than 6% of its assets ($5 million) in xAI, according to the firm.
- Asset managers have recognized that both private markets and ETFs can require investor education, and they've been rapidly hiring product and portfolio specialists as they build out in those areas, according to a report last week from Cerulli Associates.
  Not That Fancy: "When people talk about private equity, they think it's like Steve Jobs in his garage with Apple, but in many cases these are huge, late-stage companies," Armour said, with the examples of xAI, Anthropic and SpaceX being the size of top 40 US public companies. "You're not like a venture capitalist, buying private equity in an ETF." Written by Emile Hallez | | | | | | Crypto had a big 2025, but what are experts focusing on this year? Like most everything about digital assets, the 2026 crypto outlook is going to be hard to predict. While inflows will likely follow the price of various cryptocurrencies, the asset class has been notoriously tricky to forecast. The impact of new policies, like the GENIUS Act, which created a federal framework to govern cryptocurrencies in the US, will also increase as more issuers roll out stablecoins and tokenized assets. Advisors will need to pay close attention if they want to stay ahead of the curve on new products, market swings and industry changes. "You still have a significant amount of swirling risks out there on the horizon," said Matt Bartolini, State Street's global head of research. "That's why you also saw things like Ether outperform bitcoin following the GENIUS Act, because of the relationship that it does have relative to the regulations." A Healthy (Crypto) Ecosystem Following a Bitcoin price dive, crypto ETFs took in just $790 million in the fourth quarter, out of the $35 billion in annual inflows, or less than 5%. But what came first, the outflows or the price drops? The market may have been to blame since other sectors — like tech ETFs — also had slowdowns in the latter part of last year. Bartolini said he's less focused on crypto's performance than the broader crypto ecosystem and new legislation. Global crypto assets briefly surpassed $4 trillion following the enactment of the GENIUS Act, according to recent research from the legal services provider Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services. The report also found that: - Established financial institutions, like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, are exploring the stablecoin ecosystem under the new framework.
- Analysts anticipate the act will result in more stablecoin issuers, increasing competition in a space currently dominated by Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC).
On the ETF Horizon: Because of these tailwinds, the year ahead is likely to be just as big as — if not bigger than — the previous two years for crypto ETFs. "[Prices are] much higher than they were at the bottom of their trough last year," said Roxanna Islam, head of sector and industry research at VettaFi. "We have seen a little bit of strength at the beginning of the year, as prices start coming back." Stablecoins and tokenization will be big themes in 2026, Islam added, with some issuers — like Amplify, Bitwise and Grayscale — already filing for such products. "Basically what they do is invest in equities of financial companies that are involved in the stablecoin and tokenization process, and they also invest in things like Ether and Solana… So I think we're going to see a lot more talk about stablecoins and tokenization as the year goes on." Written by Lilly Riddle | | | | | | | | | Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Guggenheim Investments is not The Godfather Part III's Michael Corleone, but the ETF business is all but inescapable for asset managers nowadays. The company was once a major player in US ETFs, but it sold that $37 billion business line to Invesco in 2017. Last week, it filed for the first such products since, including an Ultrashort Bond ETF and five others: Short Duration Income, Investment Grade CLO, Enhanced Equity Income, Core Plus Bond and Securitized Income ETFs, all of which would be actively managed. Similarly, famed bond investor Jeffrey Gundlach's firm DoubleLine made a rare new product filing, indicating its plans for the forthcoming Ultrashort Income ETF. How refreshingly vanilla. "Boring is good when it comes to ETFs. This one is actively managed, but ultrashort income is just about as boring as they get," Todd Sohn, senior ETF and technical strategist at Strategas Securities, said, referring to the DoubleLine fund specifically. But boring doesn't mean unpopular. "It's a huge category," he said. Pimco's Enhanced Short Maturity Active ETF (MINT), for example, has $15 billion in assets. Short on Income The timing is interesting, Sohn noted. Potential rate cuts by the Fed later this year could mean declining yields, and that could encourage investors to move assets out of money markets, Treasurys and cash, he said. US Ultrashort bond ETFs hit what appears to be a record for inflows last year, pulling in $90 billion, compared with a recent high of $57 billion in 2022, per Morningstar Direct data. That helped raise total assets in the category to $313 billion at the end of last year, up from $223 billion in 2024. Both companies have significant reach in the industry: - Across eight ETFs, DoubleLine has about $2 billion in assets under management, compared with $51 billion in its mutual funds. Like other mutual fund sponsors, it has been bleeding assets, with nearly $2 billion in net outflows from those products in 2025.
- Guggenheim has about $50 billion in mutual fund assets under management and saw more than $400 million in net inflows last year. The company has eight US fixed income mutual funds, and there isn't much overlap with its ETF filings.
If It's Not Fixed, Don't Break It: Fixed income has been a major area of development for ETF issuers over the past year, particularly in active management. And investors are clearly interested in ultrashort income. "They probably have client demand for it," Sohn said. "Assuming they have the distribution, that could make for a successful product." Written by Emile Hallez | | | | | | | | | |
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