The rise of active ETFs is starting to look less like a niche experiment and more like a quiet reshuffling of the investment industry. According to a new MSCI survey, 71% of advisers expect to increase their use of active ETFs over the next two years.
The ETF Intelligence Survey 2026 gathered responses from 450 advisers across the US and Europe. The results suggest that the question is no longer whether active ETFs belong in portfolios, but where they make the most sense.
That shift is happening alongside continued demand for traditional passive strategies. Some 87% of advisers already use active ETFs, while 62% said they plan to increase their allocation to passive ETFs as well.
In other words, this is not a story about active replacing passive. It is about ETFs becoming a more flexible container for different investment strategies.
Active ETFs Are Coming for the Mutual Fund Shelf
The most revealing part of the survey may be what advisers expect these products to replace.
Fifty-eight percent said that, if a new active ETF came from a manager they already use, they would most likely swap out an existing mutual fund or UCITS holding for it. The underlying investment approach could remain almost identical while the wrapper changes.
That preference was even clearer among fund selectors. Half of respondents said they would move into an active ETF version of a strategy they already own, while 85% said they would consider an ETF share class of the same strategy.
A regulatory change in March helped make that structure possible. The SEC granted the final piece of relief needed for broker-dealers to trade ETF shares of multi-class funds, allowing asset managers to offer mutual fund and ETF share classes within a single portfolio.
For investors and fund managers, that could make the distinction between the two formats increasingly about structure rather than strategy.
Active ETFs Meet a Much Harder Question in Private Markets
The enthusiasm becomes noticeably more cautious when the underlying assets become harder to value or trade.
Nearly half of advisers, 49%, said they would consider using an ETF to access private or less-liquid assets. Yet only 16% believe private markets are genuinely well suited to the ETF structure.
The biggest concern is liquidity mismatch. Some 62% of respondents pointed to the risk that an ETF could trade differently from the less-liquid assets sitting underneath it.
Valuation transparency was another major issue, cited by 50% of advisers. A lack of track record followed at 44%.
That hesitation also shows that advisers are not simply chasing novelty. They appear increasingly focused on whether an ETF’s structure actually fits what it owns.
Liquidity remains one of the clearest priorities across the survey. Sixty-eight percent of respondents ranked liquidity and trading efficiency among their top considerations.
And advisers appear willing to pay more when the strategy offers something genuinely difficult to access. While only 12% would accept a premium fee for core beta exposure, 58% said they would pay a higher fee for strategies tied to harder-to-access assets or opportunities.
Jana Haines, global head of index at MSCI, described the shift as a question of fit rather than format.
“Passive ETFs remain the foundation of most adviser portfolios, but active ETFs are increasingly becoming mainstream. What we are seeing is a shift from whether advisers will use active ETFs to where the structure delivers the most value,” Haines said.
That distinction matters. The appeal of active ETFs is not simply that they are ETFs. It is that the structure can bring active strategies into a format advisers are increasingly comfortable using.
The survey also points to a more outward-looking appetite for equities. Forty-five percent of advisers expect to broaden their equity allocations, and among those respondents, emerging markets were favored by 39%, compared with 24% for developed markets.
MSCI did not disclose how the 450 respondents were divided between the US and Europe, so the regional balance of those views remains unclear.
Still, the direction is striking. Active ETFs are gaining ground not by eliminating older investment products overnight, but by becoming a more natural way for advisers to package strategies they already want.
For an industry built around increasingly granular choices, the ETF may be becoming less a product category than a default format. The next question is simply how far advisers are willing to stretch it.