RIAs added 66,233 ETF positions in Q2 and shed 41,489; only 41 funds debuted

Advisory firms kept buying exchange-traded funds in the second quarter, and the funds hoping for a first slot on an RIA lineup met a narrower door. Across AdvizorPro's matched cohort of 5,398 firms, advisers added 66,233 ETF positions and dropped 41,489, a net gain of 24,744, according to the provider's Q2 2026 RIA ETF Trends Report as reported by ETF Express. The average firm's count of unique ETFs rose to 92.9 from 88.4. Just over 63 per cent of firms increased their ETF count; 18.2 per cent reduced it.

The gate, meanwhile, got tighter. Only 41 ETFs appeared in RIA portfolios for the first time in the quarter, down from 140 in the first quarter. An added position is a call an adviser makes inside a lineup the firm has already approved. A first appearance is a fund that cleared platform diligence and an investment committee's shortlist in the same quarter, and the count of those fell by roughly seven-tenths.

Grant Engelbart, a vice president and investment strategist at Carson Wealth, points to mechanics rather than appetite. Some firms set asset thresholds a fund has to clear before they can buy it. Many new launches are increasingly esoteric, with leveraged, inverse and single-stock products among them. And actively managed ETFs can require more time for sufficient due diligence. Engelbart also makes an attention argument that issuers tend to underweight when they model shelf adoption: with as many products on the market as there are today, a new ETF needs time to gather both assets and notice from the market.

The composition of the 41 that did get through supports the esoteric point. Leveraged equity was the largest category among the newcomers, with inverse products also represented, which suggests the funds that won first-time shelf space skewed toward structures an adviser trades around a view rather than holds through a cycle. Those are also the funds least likely to sit in a model portfolio for years, though the report does not say how long the positions persist.

Smaller issuers can still break through, and the quarter's leaders are a lesson in reading a growth table carefully. EntrepreneurShares more than doubled its RIA presence, from 90 firms to 194, a 115.6 per cent gain that led the report's fastest-growing issuers. Baron Capital rose 83.3 per cent, ProcureAM 72.4 per cent and Tema 52.9 per cent.

Engelbart cautions against treating every jump as straightforward organic adoption. EntrepreneurShares' Private-Public Crossover ETF, ticker XOVR, held a substantial SpaceX position around the company's June IPO, which he says likely distorted the quarter's growth picture. The iShares International Country Rotation Active ETF, CORO, jumped from 197 RIA holders to 364 after being self-seeded through BlackRock's model-portfolio business, which makes its holder count as much a reading on that model's reach as on adviser conviction.

Read together, those two cases describe the two fastest routes onto RIA shelves, and neither is the one a product team usually plans for. A fund gets in because a sponsor controls the model and puts it there, or because a single holding made the fund's return impossible to ignore for a quarter. Neither is a mandate argument won on process.

Baron is the more instructive case. Its ETF business only launched in 2025, but the asset manager has more than four decades of active management experience behind it. It debuted five active ETFs in December, including two mutual fund conversions, which meant allocators were not being asked to trust an unfamiliar operator. For a firm weighing a new name against a platform's asset threshold, the conversion is the cheap answer: the strategy has already been run, the personnel are known, and the questions a diligence team asks about process and capacity have existing answers rather than projections. That is a different sale from the one a genuinely new strategy makes.

The matched-cohort design is what makes the quarter's headline numbers usable. Because the report follows the same 5,398 firms from one quarter to the next, the rise in average holdings reads as firms broadening lineups they already had rather than as a change in which firms the report counts. The 41,489 positions dropped in the same three months that 66,233 were added is the reminder attached to that: a slot on an RIA lineup is contested, and the average count can rise while individual funds lose their place.

What that means for a firm running a book today is narrower than the issuance headlines suggest. The number of funds a platform is willing to approve has not expanded with the number of funds being launched, and the two mechanisms that did move holder counts this quarter — a sponsor's model decision and a private-mark holding in a crossover wrapper — are not available to most issuers. A launch that needs an adviser to adopt it cold is competing against both.

AdvizorPro's third-quarter report will show whether 41 first-time appearances was a floor or a trough, and whether the second quarter's concentration in leveraged and inverse products persists. The other figure worth watching is XOVR's RIA holder count, which will show how much of EntrepreneurShares' 90-to-194 jump was tied to a SpaceX position that will not repeat.