VOO and IVV Chasing SPY for the ETF AUM Crown

We have talked about the growth of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the popularity of these products among retail traders. 

Today, we focus on the growth of ETFs tracking the S&P 500.  

Recently, Vanguard’s VOO passed State Street’s SPY, making it the largest of the S&P 500 ETFs. Although data shows SPY still leads in other categories. And then there’s Blackrock’s IVV, which isn’t far behind. 

VOO took the lead in S&P 500 ETF assets under management (AUM)

Since 2010, AUM-tracking S&P 500 ETFs have grown from $88 billion to over $1.8 trillion. Being the oldest U.S. ETF, State Street’s (SPY) ETF started with the majority (76%) of S&P 500 assets. 

However, as the chart below shows, competing ETFs from Vanguard (VOO) and Blackrock (IVV) are catching up. In fact, VOO recently passed SPY in assets. 

Chart 1: VOO and IVV are both putting pressure on AUM leader SPY

The increase in popularity of VOO and IVV may be helped by their holding costs, which are less than 1/3 the cost of SPY.  

IVV and VOO Inflows have not come from retail

In order to catch up, VOO and IVV have captured the lion share of net ETF inflows (creations) since 2017. In total, these three ETFs have seen net creations of around $643 billion since 2017, with 54% of those going into VOO.

However, using the same data we use for our retail trading updates, we see that surprisingly, SPY had the most retail inflows. In fact, SPY has added $52 billion in AUM from retail since the beginning of 2017, more than the combined net new retail assets gained by VOO, IVV and SPLG over the same period. 

That suggests that other kinds of investors have been contributing to holdings increases of IVV and VOO, and without retail buying in SPY market wide flows into the ETF would actually be negative, as evidenced by retail net flows being 127.6% of the total fund flows, further implying non-retail investors have been shifting more assets into IVV and VOO.

Chart 2: Almost 128% of net new AUM in SPY have come from retail investors since 2017

SPY remains by far the most liquid S&P 500 ETF

There is one category that SPY still dominates: Liquidity.

SPY trades over $28 billion each day — more than 10-times both IVV and VOO.

Interestingly, although retail investors like buying ETFs, their trading pales in comparison to market-wide liquidity in these products (green bars in Chart 3). Retail trading is also still focused on SPY, accounting for nearly 80% of all retail value traded in S&P 500 ETFs.

Chart 3: SPY has represented 89% of dollars traded by S&P 500 ETFs from 2017 onwards

State Street might still be able to lay claim to the asset crown

Importantly, these are not the only S&P 500 ETFs in the U.S. market. 

In fact, State Street launched another S&P 500 ETF (SPLG) in 2017, which has garnered $58 billion of its own assets (and carries a lower management fee like IVV and VOO).

Putting these together, State Street would still be able to lay claim to the S&P 500 ETF asset crown – at least for now.