ETF Inflows & Outflows
Performance Leaders & Laggards
Source: ETF Action; flows and performance data as of 10/23/25; performance data excludes leveraged and inverse products
Weekly ETF Reads
Invesco’s $400B QQQ ETF Faces Voting Delay by Sumit Roy
“If approved, the change would modernize the structure of one of the world’s largest and most-traded ETFs.”
Vanguard, Index Investing’s High Priest, Makes Big Bet on Active by Katie Greifeld
“It’s not like we rolled out of bed yesterday and decided that we want to talk about active. We have 40 to 50 years of history.”
Socialists Like Me by Jeffrey Ptak
“ARK voted with management in 1,186 of these 1,195 votes, or 99.2% of the time. The Vanguard fund, by contrast, voted with management 98.5% of the time on these same proposals.”
The ETF Market-Making Bottleneck: The Real Risk Takers Behind ETF Liquidity by Nicholas Phillips
“ETF liquidity doesn’t scale just because new tickers are listed.”
Bring On The 5x ETFs by Sumit Roy
“Volatility decay and financing costs eat away at performance, so long-term results can diverge sharply from expectations.”
(Note: Morningstar’s Jeffrey Ptak offers an excellent look at leveraged ETF financing costs here).
What’s the Difference Between 351 Exchanges and Exchange Funds? by Debbie Carlson
“These ETFs will become publicly traded, unlike exchange funds, which stay private.”
BlackRock Is Pulling Bitcoin Whales Into Wall Street’s Orbit by Emily Graffeo
“The great irony, of course, is that Bitcoin was born to escape traditional finance — and now its biggest holders are trying to get back in.”
Legacy asset manager T. Rowe Price files for its first crypto ETF by Danny Park
“The T. Rowe Price Active Crypto ETF is described as an actively-managed product that seeks to outperform the FTSE Crypto US Listed Index.”
Crypto M&A Surges 30-Fold as Niche Firms Shift to Mainstream by Isabelle Lee and Suvashree Ghosh
“Market makers, custodians, and infrastructure players are moving closer to the end investor as ETFs and regulation open new channels for institutional capital.”
BlackRock’s Tokenized ETFs Are Only The Beginning, CEO Says by Lilly Riddle
“The challenge with all the various tokenization projects to get ETFs or stocks on the blockchain is that we don’t actually have a legal structure to allow this.”
ETF Post of the Week
Since 2024, there have been 155(!) spot crypto ETF filings covering some 35 different assets – not including the existing spot crypto ETFs (primarily bitcoin and ether) already on the market.
There’s now 155 crypto ETP filings tracking 35 different digital assets. Could easily end up seeing over 200 hit mkt in next 12mo. Total land rush. Here’s the list by coin, amazing work from @JSeyff pic.twitter.com/dKyiySxn0H
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) October 21, 2025
ETF Chart of the Week
While not a chart, I enjoyed this graphic from MarketWatch, as it perfectly captures the current ETF zeitgeist. VolatilityShares recently filed for a slew of 5x leveraged ETFs on everything from Palantir to XRP. I agree with ETF.com’s Sumit Roy (read article above) in that I have zero issue with these products existing. But let’s call it like it is… investing in these is no different from pulling the lever on a slot machine – except with worse odds.
Source: MarketWatch
ETF Prime Podcast
Last week’s ETF Prime featured David Mann, Head of ETF Product & Capital Markets at Franklin Templeton, and Matt Kaufman, Head of ETFs at Calamos. David discussed the impressive growth of the firm’s ETF lineup and offered insights into their approach to product innovation, the multi-share class structure, and the evolving role of crypto in the ETF landscape. Matt Kaufman delivered a masterclass on autocallables and introduced the Calamos Autocallable Income ETF (CAIE) – the first of its kind in the industry.
Crypto Prime Podcast
There were two episodes of Crypto Prime last week. First, Krista Lynch, SVP – ETF Capital Markets at Grayscale Investments, joined me to offer an in-depth look at staking in spot ether ETFs and unpack the mechanics behind spot crypto ETF creation and redemption.
Next, Anna Wroblewska, Chief Business Officer at Dinari, discussed their recent collaboration with S&P Global to launch the S&P Digital Markets 50 Index, which will also be tokenized. She dove into Dinari’s cutting-edge platform for tokenized public securities and offered her perspective on the future of tokenization in the financial world.
Enjoy!
Bonus Webinar!
I recently hosted an insightful discussion with David Braun, Managing Director and Portfolio Manager of the PIMCO Active Bond ETF (BOND), where he shared his perspectives on today’s fixed income landscape and the growing role of actively managed bond ETFs… On Demand Webinar: Build Resilient Portfolios With PIMCO’s Bond Playbook
