, Columnist
Disruptive ETFs Face a Disruption Themselves
A new generation of online financial advisers allow investors to bypass funds and customize portfolios to match their environmental, social or governance-related goals.
ESG is factor investing on steroids, and no single fund can capture the diversity of investors’ values.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
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ETFs have new competition, and its name is ESG.
Exchange-traded funds have been one of the most disruptive forces in investing in recent years. Burned by decades of high fees and underperformance in actively managed mutual funds, investors have turned to low-cost index ETFs in big numbers. They pulled a net $39 billion from mutual funds and handed $1.5 trillion to ETFs since 2015, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.