Hello, ETF fans. Mike here with a “Quick Hitter” video. Today’s “Most Active” report highlighted a massive spike in activity that I just had to point out. While reviewing the daily updates, we saw some historic volume numbers across the iShares factor suite, signaling what looks like a significant rotation or rebalance.
Summary: A Massive Spike in Factor Activity
If you scroll through today’s most active equity outliers, the list is riddled with iShares factor strategies showing eye-popping activity relative to their average daily volume (ADV). S&P 500 Value (IVE) traded $4.5 billion, which is nearly 3,000% of its ADV. Similarly, the Quality ETF (QUAL) saw $5.4 billion in volume, hitting 2,000% of its ADV, while Momentum (MTUM) also saw elevated activity with $1.8 billion traded.
Drilling Down: Record Numbers for IVE
To give you an idea of the sheer size of this activity, I clicked through to the research frame for IVE. By jumping into the “Tools and Reports” section and pulling up the historical data, we can see that IVE traded 21,661,000 shares today.
When sorting the historical volume data to find the highest activity days since inception, today stands alone. The previous record was set on January 20, 2024, with roughly 20.4 million shares. Assuming these preliminary numbers hold, IVE just had its highest volume day in history.
A Look Under the Hood: Contextualizing the Trade
It wasn’t just Value seeing action. If we jump into the historical data for QUAL, we see it traded 28 million shares. While not an all-time record, it ranks as the second-highest volume day ever for the fund.
Given the sort of size we are seeing—multi-billion dollar prints across specific factor strategies—this is likely the result of a massive model rebalance within the BlackRock complex. It suggests a significant repositioning of models is taking place.
The Workflow
We will have to wait a couple of days for the flow data to play through to see if this was net buying or selling, but clearly, a very large trade is in play. That’s the value of monitoring the “Most Active” reports daily—it allows you to spot these historic anomalies in real-time.
Hope you enjoyed the video. Talk to you soon.
Disclosures
This material is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. All investments, including ETFs, involve risk, including the possible loss of principal. Investors should consider their investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses carefully before investing.
This analysis was developed by the team at ETF Action. We leverage advanced AI tools to assist in the drafting and refinement of our content, based on our expert prompts, direction, and final review.
