Active managers are beginning to take ETFs seriously. Last month one of the biggest holdouts to the vehicle, Dimensional Fund Advisors, announced it would offer strategies as active ETFs for the first time and it is far from alone in making the move. Another giant, T. Rowe Price, has already filed for a series of ETF versions of some of its most popular mutual funds, which are set to go live later this year. The growth of ETF assets, particularly in US equity categories, has been staggering and hardly unreported – assets in US-listed ETFs and ETPs hit $4.23tn at the end of May according to ETFGI, but the vast majority of that money is in index funds. Active managers have avoided running their strategies in an ETF format because of the daily holdings transparency ETFs have required until recently. Mutual funds are required to report their portfolios only quarterly, giving active managers a sense of security that others can’t easily front-run their moves when they’re accumulating or shedding positions. Now, with last year’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approval of different trading mechanisms that allow ETFs to avoid daily transparency, active managers no longer have a reason to avoid using ETFs for their strategies. The SEC rule has cleared a path for so-called active non-transparent (ANT) ETFs. At the start of the year, before Covid-19 struck, two of the ETF industry’s best-known commentators – Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas and CFRA’s Todd Rosenbluth, made a bet over how many assets these new types of ETFs would take in this year. Rosenbluth said more than $10bn and Balchunas said less.