Though socially responsible funds as a market segment remain small compared to the rest of the $4 trillion ETF market, their pace of growth is accelerating in 2019, thanks to a few high-profile launches and billion dollar bets.
Year to date, investors have poured $4.7 billion into socially responsible ETFs, also known as environmental, social and governance (ESG) ETFs, almost twice the total money that went into these funds in 2018. Last year, investors added $2.6 billion to the space.
More than half of this year’s flows went into two specific funds, the iShares ESG MSCI USA Leaders ETF (SUSL) and the Xtrackers MSCI U.S.A. ESG Leaders Equity ETF (USSG), both of which were seeded by the same institutional investor, Ilmarinen. Year to date, SUSL and USSG have taken in $1.4 billion and $1.2 billion, respectively (read: “Institutional Money Comes To ESG ETFs”).
Other big draws were the Vanguard ESG ETFs and several iShares ESG funds (see below) designed to replace or supplement key core asset allocations.
The ETFs with the highest 2019 flows are listed below:
Source: ETF.com; data as of July 10, 2019
Low-Cost Core Products Attract Most Flows
The common theme between the top flows gatherers is that they are all broad-based, core ETFs designed to supplement or replace vanilla exposure in an asset allocation plan.
For example, the iShares ESG MSCI EAFE ETF (ESGD) and the iShares ESG MSCI EM ETF (ESGE) both track virtually the same exposures as the iShares MSCI EAFE ETF (EFA) and the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index (EEM), just with several exclusionary screens to exclude securities rated to be the worst ESG offenders.
Notably, the top-drawing ETFs are almost all low-cost. With one exception, they all have expense ratios below 0.30%; the five ETFs with the biggest year-to-date flows are priced at or below 0.20%.
The fact that low-cost core products reign supreme in the ESG space runs counter to many assumptions around the space; namely, that these ETFs are dominated by narrow, thematic funds designed to capitalize on the next “green” fad.
