Goldman sees a $2 trillion ETF year, active money leading

Goldman Sachs has put its name on the $2 trillion forecast. The bank's Global Banking & Markets desk said Thursday, via ETF Trends, that it expects U.S.-listed ETFs to pull in that much in 2026, a 40% jump from last year. That number already had support from a handful of other shops; Goldman's data makes it a firm backstop. The first half brought in more than $1 trillion, so the back half just needs to keep pace for the full-year call to land.

The interesting part isn't the forecast itself. The ETF complex held $16.1 trillion at last count. Two trillion dollars of fresh money would equal roughly an eighth of that total in a single year. Actively managed funds have taken in more than 35% of net new money this year, according to Goldman. Yet they account for only about 13% of ETF assets. The passive core still holds most of the industry's wealth, but the marginal dollar is increasingly an active dollar.

Tom Campbell, head of Americas ETF distribution at Goldman Sachs Global Banking & Markets, listed the offerings in a statement carried by ETF Trends: levered funds, structured derivatives, fixed income with a point of view. "We're now seeing some of the most advanced active management strategies in the markets expressed within the ETF wrapper," he said. That list is a long way from the plain index fund that built the ETF business.

Institutional money is a big part of the shift. Goldman says investors are using active ETFs to try to beat benchmarks, rebalance tactically, and access derivative and income structures that used to require custom mandates. Daily liquidity makes the wrapper a convenient home for strategies that once lived in separate accounts.

Goldman's own dealmaking points in the same direction. Its agreed purchase of Neos, the four-year-old active ETF issuer, is pending a shareholder vote. ETF Daily's issuers desk reported the price at up to $2.25 billion, which would make it Goldman's second ETF acquisition this year. Buying an active ETF specialist is the corporate version of forecasting active flows.

Distribution is where the active trend becomes concrete. Goldman's data shows ETF assets tied to ready-made third-party model portfolios rose 46% over twelve months. That pushed the total to $950 billion, a channel built around RIAs and wealth managers. Model portfolios reduce the advisor's job to selecting a finished sleeve, and an active ETF is a cleaner building block for that sleeve than a mutual fund or a separately managed account.

The fee market has split along the same line. FactSet's midyear review, covered on this desk this week, found the index-fund core charging 0.03%. A minority of investors paid up for active bond management. Goldman's flow data shows that minority supplying an outsized share of new money.

The product count is getting absurd next to the stock market. Goldman puts the number of U.S.-listed ETFs on track to pass 6,000, which would be more than the count of single stocks listed domestically. The shelf now includes cap-weighted beta, single-stock moves, thematic baskets, leveraged daily resets and structured payoff profiles — a range built for every conceivable investor opinion.

AI is drawing the biggest crowd on that shelf. Semiconductor and software ETFs are seeing elevated trading activity. Jackson Isaacs, Goldman's head of Americas equity ETF trading, said June brought the largest monthly inflows on record for semiconductor funds, more than $19 billion. The same AI buildout is stirring chip-fund activity in South Korea. The theme is global, not a New York story.

The forecast is still a forecast. A broad selloff could send flows to cash and wreck the full-year total. Six months of stable mix argues against that, though: active funds holding more than a third of net flows, model-portfolio assets approaching $1 trillion, the ETF menu longer than the equity menu. If $2 trillion shows up, active money will have carried it. Product teams are already planning around that flow.