Overview
The shape of the US-listed ETF market, and where to start narrowing it down.
Snapshot data captured from Yahoo Finance via yfinance, roughly 14 months old. Open any fund for live prices.
Medians rather than means, and leveraged and inverse funds excluded: a handful of 3x products have returns extreme enough to drag an average into meaninglessness.
The market is concentrated
93%
of all assets sit with the 10 largest issuers, out of 380 in total. A count of 4,148 funds makes the market look more competitive than it is.
- Vanguard$6.56T · 89 funds
- iShares$3.18T · 447 funds
- SPDR State Street Global Advisors$1.47T · 141 funds
- Invesco$611.4B · 228 funds
- Schwab ETFs$406.9B · 33 funds
The median fund is not the median dollar
+4.20pp
Asset-weighted 3Y return is 11.79% against 7.59% equal-weighted. Equal-weighted treats a $2M fund the same as a $500B one; asset-weighted reflects what investors actually held.
Most funds are not really tradeable
46%
of funds hold under $50M or trade fewer than 10,000 shares a day, so the bid-ask spread is likely to cost more than the expense ratio. Screeners sorted by return routinely surface funds nobody can buy cheaply, which is why they are excluded from the rankings here.