Which ETFs were popular in 2021? - YouTube

hey friends welcome back to the channel my name  is sanjee and today we're going to look at the  

most popular etfs from 2021. now you're probably  wondering how am i describing or defining popular  

and it's basically based on funds under management  and in terms of how much funds flow has gone into  

each of the etfs and which of the etfs that had  the most amount of money flow into them now as a  

disclaimer popular doesn't necessarily mean good  meaning just because it was popular and had a lot  

of funds inflow into that etf it doesn't mean it  had great returns and etfs that had great returns  

may not have had great funds inflow either so  this is purely looking at it from a popularity  

point of view in terms of where were a lot of  people investing and buying etfs and which types  

of etfs are they so in this video we'll just  have a quick look at that list of top etfs in  

terms of funds inflow and have a bit of a think  of what kind of themes there might be and also  

maybe look into 2022 what might be popular during  those future years so the way to figure out funds  

inflow is you can look at some of these different  reports that are put out by whether it's the asx  

or in this case etf securities which is actually  a company that does their own ets but they also  

put out these weekly etf market monitor reports  and i'll show you a quick screenshot of it's  

got a few tables on it and it's free to  use you can go and download it yourself  

i'll leave a link below and the idea is you  pull this report up and you can see what the top  

performing etfs in terms of returns were but then  the second set of tables is this interesting bit  

where you can see the funds flow and it's broken  down into what happened in the last one week  

year to date so since the start of 2021 till now  in early december and 12-month flow so that's sort  

of a rolling 12 months last 12 months what's  happened so looking at the table this is what  

we have for year-to-date flows for 2021 so far  and it's the usual suspects you got vas vgs ndq  

fe a200 the top five kind of makes sense vas and  vgs are kind of your bread and butter ets for  

investing in or for australians investing in the  share market you've got vast top 300 vgs the whole  

world excluding australia so you've got a nice  combination of domestic and international ndq it's  

been a great performer it's a nasdaq 100 tracker  i believe it's been performing really well it's a  

way of saying you want to get exposure to the top  tech companies so makes a lot of sense it's got  

a lot of inflows into it ethi again a great theme  ethical investing especially beta shares i like  

beta shares ethical products they're very true to  label should you say and then beta shares a 200  

product kind of the alternative to vas if you want  a more narrow selection than the top 300 you can  

go for the top 200. now when you look a little  bit further down the list i'm actually really  

glad to see vdhg in there because i actually think  this is a great etf product i don't have it myself  

but i do think it's great in that it's got both  domestic and international it's got hedging and  

not hedge so if you're worried about currency it  sort of has a bit of balance for that it's got  

equities and fixed income and it automatically  rebalances itself it's a great etf to do that  

set and forget type investing for your etf  investments so i thought it'd be interesting  

to also look at the top 20 20 etfs in terms  of funds flow there to see any common themes  

and you can see vas is still there ndq is  there but other than that there's no vgs  

vgad is there the hedged version but not the  unhedged version gold is there so obviously a  

shift towards gold maybe the uncertainty of covert  from 2020 had a lot of people shifting money into  

there and interestingly while a200 didn't have a  position here in this top 10 list ioz nstw both  

the alternatives that i guess to vas was in there  so interesting to see quite a lot of shift towards  

those products and they weren't necessarily  there in the following year so maybe people who  

had position taken those positions up weren't  really investing there the one thing i'm not  

sure when it comes to a lot of this stuff is it's  obviously got retail flows in here but i do wonder  

if there's a lot of institutional flows going in  and out of these etfs as well because to see the  

level of volume going in and out in terms of you  know a200 was there this year but not their last  

year tells me maybe there is some institutional  money going in as well on top of the retail money  

and that would probably explain quite a lot of  the flexibility going on or the variability going  

on here now an interesting thing i also wanted  to see was google trends versus what people are  

buying in terms of etfs so i wanted to see what's  popular in terms of etfs from fundsflow but then  

also what's popular in terms of google trends and  google searches and you can do this yourself where  

you just go to google trends and you type in the  search terms that you want to see in terms of the  

popularity of it's being searched on the internet  through google so i threw in vas vgs ndq a200 the  

top five list from this year and looked at what  is the actual charting of the interest in terms  

of people googling it over time and it's kind  of an interesting segmentation you've got here  

you've got vass clearly in blue an outlier it's  going it's very popular everyone's searching for  

it makes a lot of sense then you've got that small  category the next category down with vgs and ndq  

the kind of next level of popularity the red and  the yellow line and then you've got the green the  

purple with fena 200 sort of a segment down so  while it doesn't exactly line up in terms of you  

know vast vgs ndq at the a200 the pockets of all  the the segments make a lot of sense vast popular  

then the next two and then the next two so there  does seem to be an interesting kind of relative  

relationship with what people are googling versus  what they're investing in and maybe that's where  

you know you can see the research come through  as well obviously this was not very scientific i  

probably should have looked at other etfs as well  to see if they were googled heavily but weren't  

invested in but for the purpose of this i think  this is very reasonable to say it's popular on  

google it's probably popular in terms of what  people are buying so looking forward to 2022  

i was thinking what kind of etfs might be popular  then it will probably be your usual suspects vas  

maybe vgs or ndq will continue to be quite popular  i think we'll shift a bit more into the crypto  

space so cryp digger maybe the new bitcoin and  ethereum tracking etfs i don't know who's bringing  

it out i used to say it was going to be beauty  shares but i'm actually not sure if it's beauty  

shares or etf securities or one of those will come  out i think that'll be an interesting space to see  

if they start to see a lot of funds inflow go into  them doesn't necessarily mean it's a great product  

to buy in terms of returns just means a lot of  people will probably put a lot of money into them  

in terms of ethical as well i think  they'll see we saw ethi was popular in 2021  

probably continue to see a bit more inflow into  it and then if there's a bit of uncertainty we  

might see a bit of action with gold as usual  flight to gold in terms of uncertainty so as i  

said at the start of the video just because an  etf is popular and it's getting a lot of funds  

it doesn't necessarily mean it's a great product  doesn't also mean it's a bad product it just means  

it's getting a lot of funds into it for whatever  reason a lot of retailer maybe institutional  

investors are putting a lot of money into buying  that particular etf and the movement of the etf  

share price is not in any way related to how  much people are buying or selling of it it's more  

related to the underlying assets underneath it so  be cool just be conscious of that if you are new  

to the investing space please do check out some  of my videos about vas and vgs or vdhg the forever  

etfs i've done a few videos on these topics and  consider subscribing for future videos bye for now