Under the dual support of deepening reforms in the capital market and policy dividends, the domestic ETF market is experiencing a historic leap forward. The latest "White Paper on ETF Market Development (2025)" released by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and the "ETF Industry Development Report (2026)" released by the Shanghai Stock Exchange show that by the end of 2025, the total size of domestic ETFs has historically exceeded 6 trillion yuan, with an annual growth rate of up to 62%, and the proportion of A-share market value has increased to 6.1%. From the first trillion yuan, which took 16 years, to the current sixth trillion yuan, which only takes 4 months, the ETF market has not only broken records for scale growth, but also achieved both quality and efficiency improvements in product innovation, investor structure optimization, and internationalization. It has gradually developed into an important carrier for residents' wealth management and medium - to long-term fund entry into the market. By 2025, with the strong push of the "Action Plan for Promoting the High Quality Development of Index based Investment in the Capital Market" and the top-level design of promoting the entry of medium and long-term funds into the market, the domestic ETF market will show an explosive growth trend, driven by the dual engines of scale leap, structural optimization, broad base, and technology theme. According to data reported by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, as of the end of 2025, the total number of domestically listed ETFs reached 1381, and the size of non monetary ETFs reached 5.84 trillion yuan, a net increase of 2.28 trillion yuan or 64% compared to the end of 2024. It is worth noting that the market increment presents a "dual track drive" feature - the continuous expansion of existing product scale and the contribution of new products are equally important. Among them, wide base ETFs, as the "ballast stone" of the market, have seen an overall growth of 17% in scale, and multi billion dollar wide base ETFs continue to emerge, indicating a strong demand from investors for core asset allocation. The strong performance of the technology sector has become another major growth pole in the ETF market. Under the leadership of new quality productivity fields such as artificial intelligence and robotics, the scale of industry themed ETFs has soared by 82%, becoming a hot spot for capital pursuit. At the same time, dividend and free cash flow ETFs in strategic ETFs are leading growth, reflecting the market's growing preference for defensive asset allocation and deterministic cash flow strategies. By 2025, the "low fee era" of the ETF market will fully arrive, with the gradual establishment of mandatory and high-frequency dividend mechanisms, and the continuous optimization of investor return experience. The reporter learned that with the intensification of market competition and regulatory guidance, ETF management fees have generally been lowered, coupled with the improvement of dividend mechanisms, investors' actual sense of gain has significantly increased. This two-way force of "reducing fees and benefits" and "strengthening returns" is driving the transformation of ETFs from short-term trading tools to long-term allocation tools, gradually becoming an important option for residents' wealth management. According to a report from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the trading volume of Shenzhen ETFs will increase by 189% year-on-year in 2025, with a significantly higher turnover rate than the stock and bond markets, and the market vitality will continue to burst. In terms of product innovation, bond ETFs and commodity ETFs have become the biggest highlights of the year. The above report shows that benefiting from the significant increase in holdings of medium and long-term funds and the launch of innovative products such as benchmark market making credit bond ETFs and science and technology innovation bond ETFs, the overall size of bond ETFs has increased nearly fourfold, becoming an important channel for institutional funds to allocate interest rate bonds and credit bonds. At the same time, commodity ETFs have doubled in size driven by the demand for large-scale asset allocation, and cross-border ETFs have also doubled in size, precisely meeting the urgent needs of investors for diversified investment and global asset allocation. The report from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on the acceleration of internationalization and optimization of investor structure points out that the internationalization process of the ETF market will take a key step in 2025. The ChiNext ETF has successfully landed in the Singapore and Brazil markets through the interconnection mechanism, forming a preliminary "Chuang" series index all-weather trading ecosystem across time zones. More groundbreaking is that the Shentai ETF-DR project has pioneered the listing of domestic ETFs overseas through depositary receipts, providing a new path for domestic ETFs to go global. At the same time, the Shanghai Stock Exchange report pointed out that the interconnection targets of ETFs continue to expand, the channels for foreign investment to participate in the domestic ETF market are more smooth, and the two-way opening pattern of the capital market is further deepened. The optimization of investor structure is also remarkable. According to a report from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, by 2025, the number of ETF holders in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange will increase by 20%, with institutional investors holding 58% of ETFs, an increase of 12 percentage points from the beginning of the year. This change indicates that ETFs are gaining favor from medium - to long-term funds such as pension funds and insurance funds, and market pricing efficiency and stability are synchronously improving. In order to cultivate mature investment concepts, the activities organized by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, such as "Check in ETF Fixed Investment", "Fixed Investment China - ETF Fixed Investment Case Exhibition" and "The Fourth National ETF Elite Challenge", have attracted over 400000 investors to participate, with online views exceeding 100 million and significant results in investor education. 6 trillion yuan is not the end point, but a new starting point, "said the head of the index investment department of a large public fund." The current ETF market has entered a stage of high-quality development. In the future, with the comprehensive implementation of the personal pension system, the continuous entry of medium and long-term funds into the market, and the further enrichment of derivative tools such as ETF options, ETFs will play a more important role in serving the transformation and upgrading of the real economy and promoting the two-way opening of the capital market. We expect that in the next three to five years, the domestic ETF market is expected to launch an impact on a scale of 10 trillion yuan. ”Multiple industry insiders have stated that the domestic ETF market has undergone a transformation from a trillion yuan to six trillion yuan market in just six years, from peripheral products to mainstream configurations, from single equity to cross-border diversified layouts of stock and bond traders. Along with the expansion of scale, structural changes such as a decrease in rates, normalization of dividends, and an increase in the proportion of institutions indicate that the market is moving from accumulating quantity to improving quality. How to further enrich the derivatives ecosystem, optimize the market maker system, and promote ETFs to be included in more long-term fund allocation scope will be the key proposition for the next stage of ETF market construction. (New Society)