Passive Investing before and after the Crisis: Investors’ views on exchange-traded funds and competing index products

Investment in ETFs  has been remarkably robust in the course of the recent financial crisis. This paper analyses investors’ perceptions of ETFs and other indexing products by comparing the answers to two surveys of ETF users carried out in 2008 and 2009. We find that the crisis has divided the ETF market in two segments. Whereas ETFs in standard asset classes have been unaffected by the crisis, ETFs for alternative asset classes face challenges. However, ETFs are generally well ranked in comparison to other indexing products – presumably because of an increased focus on liquidity and transparency.