Vanguard Poised to Gain the Lead in ETF Assets: Bloomberg

Mallika Mitra

Thu, May 15, 2025, 2:30 PM 2 min read

Vanguard is conscionable 1 oregon 2 years distant from taking BlackRock’s rubric arsenic the king of exchange-traded funds, according to Eric Balchunas, elder ETF expert astatine Bloomberg.

In a note published Thursday, Balchunas said that portion Vanguard holds the second-highest spot successful ETFs with $3.2 trillion successful assets, it lone trails the world’s largest plus manager by $146 billion.

Vanguard is presently starring with $131 cardinal successful caller flows for the twelvemonth compared to BlackRock’s $61 billion, mounting it connected gait to flooded BlackRock successful astir a year, Balchunas wrote.

That’s a importantly faster takeover than what manufacture experts predicted adjacent conscionable a fewer weeks ago. In April, Allan Roth, an etf.com contributor and laminitis of fiscal readying and concern advisory steadfast Wealth Logic, estimated that it would instrumentality Vanguard astatine slightest a decennary to overtake BlackRock.

“At Vanguard, it’s not the size of our haystack but what our 50 cardinal investors are getting from the haystack,” Rodney Comegys, planetary caput of Vanguard's Equity Index Group, shared with etf.com successful an emailed statement. “We admit this sentiment, but our precedence is helping our clients execute their concern goals alternatively than connected which steadfast manages the astir ETF assets.”

BlackRock pointed etf.com to its emailed connection from a BlackRock spokesperson successful the aforementioned story: “The quality, breadth and innovation of our ETF platform—from halfway allocation tools to progressive ETFs to integer assets ETFs—puts america successful a unsocial presumption to champion conscionable changing lawsuit request done assorted marketplace cycles.”

While Vanguard whitethorn pb the mode successful astir each money class and beryllium good connected its mode to closing the spread betwixt itself and BlackRock successful the ETF space, it inactive has a ways to spell erstwhile it comes to progressive funds. The money supplier is presently No. 3 with conscionable 8% of assets, putting it acold down Capital Group and Fidelity, Balchunas wrote. He added that the steadfast volition apt person to motorboat progressive equity ETFs successful summation to its caller actively managed enslaved strategies, and backmost these launches with selling efforts, to drawback up to its competitors.

That it's down successful progressive assets is not surprising, fixed the imaginativeness Vanguard was founded on. Founder John Bogle was a proponent of low-cost passive investing and expressed disapproval of progressive investing.

Still, Bogle’s dreams for the manufacture haven’t precisely travel to fruition.

“Founder John Bogle told employees successful 1991 that Vanguard's ngo wouldn't beryllium implicit until its stock began to erode, since that would bespeak that the remainder of the manufacture had gotten inexpensive capable to re-establish the spot needed to pull investors,” Balchunas wrote. “That won't hap soon.”