The active ETF market is no longer emerging—it is accelerating. Assets in actively managed ETFs in the United States surpassed $1.4 trillion by the end of 2025, and momentum heading into 2026 remains strong. For financial advisors navigating persistent volatility, concentration risk, and shifting rate expectations, the investment question has evolved. The conversation is no longer about what an active ETF is. The focus now is how to use the structure thoughtfully within client portfolios.
MFS Investment Management, the firm that launched the first U.S. open-end mutual fund, in 1924, has entered the ETF market with a clear, deliberate strategy to meet advisors where they are. Rather than reinventing its identity for a new wrapper, the firm is extending its long-standing investment discipline into the ETF structure.
In December 2024, MFS launched five actively managed ETFs spanning U.S. value, U.S. growth, international equity, core plus bond, and intermediate municipal bond strategies. In the autumn of 2025, the firm expanded the lineup with three additional ETFs—the MFS Active Mid Cap ETF (ticker: MMID), the MFS Blended Research® Core Equity ETF (ticker: BRCE) and the MFS Blended Research® International Equity ETF (ticker: BRIE). And most recently, in early March 2026, MFS introduced its Blended Research® Emerging Markets Equity ETF (ticker: BREE)—bringing its active ETF roster to nine strategies.
Each ETF is managed by the same investment teams responsible for the firm’s mutual fund strategies, applying the same research-driven, long-term approach that has defined MFS for more than a century.
Jamie Harrison, Head of ETF Capital Markets at MFS Investment Management, describes the firm’s strategy in direct terms. Rather than constructing an ETF operation separate from its core competencies, MFS is building from its existing foundation.
“We’ve approached our ETF franchise in the same way we approached launching the first mutual fund over 100 years ago,” Harrison tells The Wealth Advisor’s Scott Martin. “We’re going to continue to lean into our strengths here and leverage our investment teams that have proven their value over the last century.”
A Growing Lineup, One Investment Philosophy
Each fund in the MFS active ETF lineup reflects the firm’s established investment framework, adapted to the ETF vehicle without altering the underlying process.
The MFS Active Growth ETF (ticker: MFSG) seeks companies whose duration of growth potential the firm believes is underappreciated by the market, with an emphasis on high-quality businesses with competitive advantages and pricing power. The MFS Active Value ETF (ticker: MFSV) takes a long-term horizon with a focus on downside risk management, concentrating on large-cap, attractively valued companies. The MFS Active International ETF (ticker: MFSI) aims to exploit short-term market inefficiencies through a growth-at-a-reasonable-price approach with a quality bias. MMID seeks capital appreciation with a consistent quality focus—including franchise durability—applying rigorous valuation discipline with a heavy emphasis on cash flow-based methodologies and targeting companies with above-average growth of free cash flow.
On the fixed income side, the MFS Active Core Plus Bond ETF (ticker: MFSB) seeks total return by integrating macro, bottom-up, and technical perspectives; while the MFS Active Intermediate Muni Bond ETF (ticker: MFSM) seeks to drive total return by exploiting inefficiencies in municipal credit markets through active sector, quality, and security selection.
The four most recent additions also include three funds managed by members of MFS’s Quantitative Solutions group that blend fundamental and quantitative research to build well-diversified core equity portfolios. At MFS, Blended Research combines the depth of fundamental research with the breadth of quantitative analysis to capture what the firm believes are the most attractive ideas across markets.
BRCE and BRIE target U.S. and international developed market stocks, respectively, while BREE focuses on emerging markets, investing in high-quality companies trading at favorable valuations with a catalyst that may be rewarded over the long term. BRCE aims to outperform the S&P 500 Index, BRIE targets the MSCI ACWI ex US Index, and BREE tracks the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, each with a targeted tracking error of approximately 2% over a full market cycle.
For advisors already familiar with MFS mutual fund strategies, the mandates and philosophy will feel consistent. The ETF wrapper introduces intraday tradability and structural flexibility, while the investment DNA remains intact.
The Case for Combining Active and Passive
Portfolio construction among advisors has grown more nuanced in recent years. Passive exposure often anchors core allocations efficiently, while active strategies are layered in to pursue differentiated exposures or manage risk more deliberately. Harrison views the mingling of active and passive approaches as one of the most meaningful shifts underway in advisor practices.
The logic is straightforward: broad, low-cost, passive ETFs can provide foundational core portfolio exposure efficiently, while active ETFs can complement holdings to pursue specific tilts—for example, regional, sector-based, or asset class-specific—along with the kind of risk management that passive vehicles structurally cannot provide. The value of active management in a blended portfolio showed up clearly during the market volatility of April 2025, when downside mitigation may have helped limit losses in real time.
“Certainly, we saw the benefits of that in the April sell-off,” Harrison notes. “I expect that benefits will be reflected again one day when that volatility will almost certainly return to the market.”
What makes the active-passive blend particularly practical for advisors is the range of opportunities for deployment. Beyond the potential for volatility management, active ETFs can help advisors pursue targeted exposures that a broad passive index may not capture cleanly. “The benefits of that are you can tilt your portfolio to certain regions’ exposures or asset classes, but really a benefit of that is the diversification and downside protection that active management can provide,” Harrison says.
In a new year with market conditions that have already tested advisor conviction, the ability to manage risk actively—rather than ride an index down—is an argument that might resonate with clients in a way that can be difficult to articulate in calmer environments. Active ETFs may give advisors a way to pursue that protection without sacrificing the structural benefits of the ETF wrapper itself.
Clearing Up the Misconceptions
Despite the growth of the active ETF market, a persistent set of misconceptions continues to create hesitation among some advisors—and Harrison is direct about where the responsibility for fixing that falls. “I think we often hear that active ETFs are complex. They’re relatively new, illiquid, and untested, and that’s really just not true,” he says. “I think it’s up to us as an industry to help educate our clients.”
The facts bear him out. The first actively managed ETF was launched in 2008. The ecosystem supporting active ETFs—market makers, authorized participants, dedicated capital markets teams—is mature, well-tested, and functionally identical to the one supporting passive ETFs. Active ETFs leverage the same institutional liquidity infrastructure as passive products, and in most cases, executing a trade is as straightforward as buying or selling any other ETF.
One of the more common points of confusion involves daily trading volume as a proxy for liquidity. In reality, an ETF’s liquidity is determined primarily by the tradability of its underlying basket of securities, not by how frequently the ETF itself changes hands. A large-cap equity ETF with modest daily volume can still be highly liquid if the underlying holdings are themselves easily traded. Similarly, the last traded price of an ETF isn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of fair value—especially for ETFs that don’t trade continuously. The real-time bid/ask spread is a more accurate reflection of where an investor can transact.
Harrison encourages advisors to consider more than surface statistics when evaluating a strategy.
“Look under the hood, engage with an ETF’s capital markets team, because we hate to see an advisor lose out on an ETF opportunity because they’re distracted by an irrelevant benchmark or a misconception,” he says.
Regulatory Tailwinds and the Road Ahead
Regulatory developments have also supported the expansion of the active ETF landscape. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s ETF Rule (Rule 6c-11), adopted in 2019, streamlined the approval process for ETF launches and reduced operational barriers for issuers. Greater ease of entry has led to a wider range of products and more asset managers participating in the structure. Harrison views product growth, issuer participation, and advisor adoption as interconnected forces.
“As more product comes to market, as more issuers come to market, that adoption rate and awareness is only going to increase,” he says. “With the growing adoption rate comes growing awareness of these powerful benefits.”
The current stage of the active ETF market represents an early chapter rather than a mature endpoint. Product breadth is expanding, structural innovation continues, and advisor familiarity is deepening. Advisors who develop fluency with the structure today may be better positioned to deploy it effectively as the market evolves.
The demand is being driven by something more durable than novelty. Harrison points to a growing recognition among investors of active ETFs’ potential utility. “I think a lot of the reason for the demand we’re seeing is just a growing awareness of the benefits of these products—whether that’s from a tax standpoint, a transparency or tradability standpoint,” he says. “These benefits are really resonating with our investors.”
Meeting Clients Where They Are
MFS is building its ETF lineup with the same long-term orientation that defines its investment approach—not chasing flows but seeking to offer strategies that enable advisors to serve clients across different wrappers and account types. The consistency of the underlying investment philosophy across time and vehicles is a feature, not an accident.
“We’re going to meet our clients where they are, whether that’s in an SMA or our mutual fund, or an ETF,” Harrison says. “We’re going to bring that same time-tested value that our investment team has cultivated again over the last 100 years.”
While the ETF structure may be modern, the investment discipline behind it is proving timeless.
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Additional Resources
- Contact MFS Investment Management
- Inside MFS Active ETFs
- Exploring What Active ETFs Can Do For You
- Debunking Five Common ETF Myths
- Meet the Team
