Tom Lydon from ETF Trends had a blurb about the increased usage of ETFs by RIAs (Registered Investment Advisors).
He says that the fastest growing advisor segment are those advisors with affiliations for providing fee-based advice. The trend towards independent fee advice continues to grow exponentially and RIAs are catching on to the ETF advantage.
I have written about the fee-based benefits as opposed to dealing with a sales person peddling preferred company products before, so this is no surprise. In my own practice, I have too increasingly used ETF products, but only when appropriate.
There are some advisors who have totally dropped no load mutual funds from their menu of investment choices, but I think that is a mistake. There are times when no load funds are better performers, and there are investment areas where you are better of using ETFs. Of course, you can only evaluate that if you actually rank both to see which performs better in a given environment.
After all, it’s nothing but performance that will get us to our financial goals and not the vehicle.