A NOTE FROM BOB

The ETF market is growing – fast. Total assets under management for exchange traded funds is quickly approaching a record $4 trillion. This comes as we saw significant inflows into the ETF universe last month. U.S. equities saw roughly $20 billion pour into it, international equities saw $5 billion and U.S. fixed income saw nearly $9 billion.

ETF.com managing director Dave Nadig told me "$31 billion is a very, very strong month, and it completely reverses the anemic equity story that dominated a lot of the first quarter." He added, "I think the flows into long bonds are also interesting. This shows how firmly the market is discounting any rate cuts this year." 

One of the few losing assets was commodities, mostly gold, which saw outflows of $2 billion. Gold has seen outflows all year as the precious metal erases its gains for 2019.

What does this all mean?

"Investors are still looking to push the market higher and still have a risk attitude heading into May," Todd Rosenbluth, director of ETF and mutual fund research at CFRA told me.

One thing to watch this week is a key test for the IPO market.

IPOs have been hot, making the IPO ETF even hotter. The Renaissance Capital IPO ETF, ticker symbol IPO, is a basket of roughly the last 60 large IPOs and is up more than 30% this year. This could be an all-time record year for the IPO market. This will be a particularly interesting couple of days given Lyft’s first earnings report on Tuesday afternoon and the Uber IPO later this week. 

For up-to-date information on the latest ETF trends, catch me live Mondays at 1pm ET on cnbc.com/etf-edge.

Bob

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