Advisers will pay for access, not for beta

MSCI's ETF Intelligence Survey 2026 canvassed 450 advisers across the U.S. and Europe, and with 87% already invested in active ETFs and 71% expecting to raise that use over the next two years, the adoption question is closed and the study reads as a pricing exercise. Its sharpest line is the five-to-one spread between the 58% who would pay more for a difficult-to-access strategy and the 12% who would pay a higher fee for core beta.

That spread points the wealth channel's money toward scarcity rather than stock selection, and the advisers are not telling MSCI they have rediscovered conviction in active management; they are telling MSCI that access is worth paying for, a different product to run and a harder one at scale because difficult-to-access strategies are the ones that tend to arrive with capacity limits. The number asset managers should tape to the wall is also 58%, the share who say a new active ETF allocation from a manager they already use would most likely displace an existing mutual fund or UCITS holding. Half of respondents would switch to an active ETF version of a strategy they already hold, and 85% of those involved in fund selection are open to an ETF share class of the same strategy—almost all of this is shelf migration, and the manager that underwrites the conversion keeps the assets while the one that waits watches them leave in a wrapper it does not offer.

Passive grows alongside, with 62% planning to raise passive allocations, which makes the boom a vehicle story as much as an active-versus-passive verdict; thematic and megatrend ETFs draw the strongest demand at 47%, and among the 45% of respondents who expect to broaden equity allocations beyond their home markets, 39% point to emerging markets against 24% for developed.

Liquidity and efficient trading rank among the top priorities for 68% of respondents, a priority that collides with the next product line, since 49% are open to accessing private or less liquid assets through an ETF. Only 16% consider private markets a good fit for the structure, with 62% citing a mismatch between the ETF's liquidity and its underlying assets, 50% valuation transparency and 44% a lack of track record.

The gap between openness and conviction is where the private-markets ETF pipeline is exposed. As this publication has argued about semi-liquid vehicles, the liquidity gate is the term sheet, and advisers here are reading that clause at the point of purchase instead of after a redemption queue forms. Managers can list the wrapper; nothing in these numbers says the allocator has been persuaded the structure holds. Jana Haines, MSCI's global head of index, frames the shift as advisers moving from whether to use active ETFs to where the structure delivers value, and the survey answers the price half of that already: 12% for core beta, with the rest reserved for strategies that are hard to get.