BlackRock’s Target Date ETFs Aim for $3T Market

Target date ETFs are big in the mutual fund world. They have nearly $3 trillion in assets under management and are used widely by investors planning for retirement. 

But they haven’t yet caught on in the exchange-traded fund world. BlackRock hopes to change that with its suite of target date ETFs which launched late last year. 

In this episode of Exchange Traded Fridays, Danny Prince, U.S. head of iShares product consulting, discusses BlackRock’s target date ETFs, as well as some of the company’s other active ETFs. 

Why target date ETFs now? This isn’t the issuer’s first foray into these specialized retirement funds. The firm was managing index-based target date ETFs a decade ago but shut them down when they failed to gain traction. 

This time around, BlackRock is utilizing active management, which it hopes will be a differentiating factor that drives demand for these products. 

Prince believes that active ETFs—which today account for a tiny slice of BlackRock’s AUM—will grow to be a much larger slice of the pie.