AB Tax-Aware Short Duration Municipal ETF

TAFI

Market cap $917M

Just three years after launching its first ETFs, AllianceBernstein (AB) recently reached $10 billion in assets. While index-based ETFs from iShares, Vanguard and State Street Investment Management continue to dominate the industry, there has been room for newer entrants to also succeed.

In September 2025, AllianceBernstein (AB) will hit the three-year anniversary of launching its active ETF suite. When we last spotlighted the suite in November 2023, the firm had just crossed the $1 billion mark.

Actively managed ETFs continued to gain traction in July with $24 billion of net inflows. This represented 19% of the industry's net inflows, which remains impressive given the 7% share of the assets.

Not so long ago, many investors were clamoring for yield outside of the traditional 60/40 stock and bond split. After more than a year of an active rates market, it's hard to say that's true today.

Investors continue to turn to low-cost core taxable bond ETFs in 2024. The Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF (BND) and the iShares Core Aggregate Bond ETF (AGG) gathered $2.5 billion and $2.1 billion, respectively, as of late February.

Fund investors were net purchasers of fixed income funds (+$3.9 billion), commodity funds (+$220 million), and alternatives funds (+$68 million). For the week, the Treasury yield rose at the long end of the curve, with the 20- and 30-year yields witnessing the largest increases, rising 10 basis points (bps) to 4.52% and 4.41%, respectively.

Demand has been strong for short-term fixed income ETFs in 2023. That helped AllianceBernstein (AB) pass $1 billion invested in ETFs assets in early November.