Talking Heads – A look at the latest ETF flows

Talking Heads podcast with Daniel Dornel, Head of ETF Research

Daniel Morris: Hello and welcome to the BNP Paribas Asset Management Talking Heads podcast. Every week, Talking Heads will bring you in-depth insights and analysis through the lens of sustainability on the topics of that really matter to investors. In this episode, we’ll be discussing ETF flows. I’m Daniel Morris, Chief Market Strategist, and I’m joined today by Daniel Dornel, Head of ETF Research. Welcome, Daniel, and thanks for joining me.

Daniel Dornel: Hi, Daniel, Thank you for having me.

DM: We had a chat about three months ago talking about developments in the market, how ETF flows were responding to those developments. If I think about what’s happened over the last three months, the good news is that a lot of the anxieties that we had haven’t been realised. Initially, we were quite worried about the impact on economic growth from US tariffs, both on the US economy and the global economy. Subsequently, there were worries about an increase in US Treasury yields with the ‘big, beautiful bill’ that was initially by the US House of Representatives. And we’ve had conflict in the Middle East, which raised worries about a spike in oil prices and a slowdown in economic growth. With all that uncertainty, all that volatility, what has been the reaction in the ETF market in the second quarter?

DD: Q2 2025 has been a very strong quarter overall with over 60 billion euro in inflows. It makes it the largest quarterly figure ever. With a lot of uncertainty, especially around the geopolitical discussions and also the US equity market, we started the quarter with significant outflows mainly from US equity products. In the end, that still ended up being positive. During the quarter, flows were mostly led by equities with over 40 billion euro in flows. Overall, Q2 flows were mainly driven by global and European equity [products] with respectively 21 billion euro and 14 billion euro in inflows. It was also a strong quarter for emerging market equities with over 4 billion, which makes it the strongest quarter for emerging markets since Q1 2023.

DM: You said initially you had outflows from US equities, but did they turn back to inflows by the end of the quarter?

DD: Yes, they did. It was positive in May, but not in June.

DM: A lot of investors have been thinking about alternatives to US equities given everything that’s going on. Also, a lot of enthusiasm about the outlook for Europe given a focus on security in the region, infrastructure spending in Germany. Can you elaborate on the US equity flows given the market uncertainty?

DD: We started the quarter on a difficult note with outflows of almost 6 billion. We haven’t seen a rotation out of US equities into European and global equities, but it’s more that investors stop allocating more money to the US. If we look into the details, we still saw significant inflows into core exposures such as the S&P 500 or NASDAQ 100 with around 10 billion in inflows. In the meantime, we have seen outflows from smart beta and ESG strategies. On smart beta strategies, we have seen outflows mainly on equal-weight strategies, but also mid and small-cap exposures.

DM: You pointed out some of the nuances. If we look at US equity flows, have you seen something similar on the fixed income side?

DD: Fixed income were very strong in Q2 overall with 19 billion in inflows. It’s one of the largest quarterly figure ever. Looking at the sub-asset class level,  we observed that the less risky sub-asset classes were favoured by investors with government and ultrashort bond exposures leading the flows with respectively 7.6 billion and 6.7 billion in inflows. In terms of regional allocation, if we look at the government bond flows, they were largely dominated by eurozone exposures with over 4 billion followed by global ones. It’s similar to what we have seen on equity where flows on US exposures were lower than global and the eurozone ones.

DM: To wrap up, Daniel, maybe you can share with us any other interesting trends you see in the markets over the last quarter?

DD: I’d like to mention four things. On fixed income, I mentioned that the bulk of the flows were into the less risky asset classes. In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a gain in interest for more risky ones with corporate investment-grade and high-yield exposures getting some traction. And we are seeing a change in terms of where investors are allocating money back to equity. Something to mention are the positive flows that we have seen on different ETFs. We have seen a lot of flows also into active ETFs. Just like on passive exposures, I would say most of the flows were into global and European exposures. If we look into the details, more enhanced strategies have been gathering interest. Just to clarify this point, what we mean by enhanced strategies are products that tend to have a quite low tracking error and quite low deviation versus standard indices. They behave very similarly to traditional passive strategies with a different aspect such as ESG integration or alpha generation. The final comment I would like to make is on ESG flows. We have seen only 6% of the flows in Q2 into ESG products, which is a very low point. It’s even lower than the previous quarter. If you look at the details, we still see different trends for low tracking error strategies. Those products still experienced inflows of around 3 billion, while the very selective strategies that tend to deviate a lot from a traditional benchmark suffered a lot in terms of flows.

DM: If I could summarise some of the key points, the main theme was uncertainty. That was manifested if we look at the outflows initially from US equities and positive flows into European and emerging market equities. For fixed income, you saw flows to generally lower risk assets, government bonds, short duration funds, also concentrated in the eurozone. Encouragingly, you saw a return in risk appetite, flows more recently including active ETFs and positive flows into lower tracking error ESG ETFs. Well, Daniel, thank you very much for joining me.

DD: Thank you very much.

DM: And that’s it for this week’s episode of Talking Heads. If you would like more information about our ETF capabilities, please reach out to your BNP Paribas Asset Management contact or check out Viewpoint, our website for investment insights at viewpoint.bnpparibas-am.com. We recommend subscribing to Talking Heads on your favourite podcast channel such as YouTube or Spotify. You’ll receive your podcast episodes every week. If you like Talking Heads, leave us a positive review and a nice rating. You’ve been listening to the BNP Paribas Asset Management Talking Heads podcast with me, Daniel Morris, and Daniel Dornel, Head of ETF Research. Please do join me next week. Until then, take care.