We’ve said this before and to be sure, it’s not a popular thing to say if you’re hanging out with retail investors or anyone who isn’t an active manager, but fuck it, we’re going to say it again anyway: the democratization of investing, facilitated in no small part by the rampant proliferation of exchange-traded products, has gone too far.

This is a classic case of a situation where the backlash against an inherently self-serving, and increasingly nefarious business model (in this case active management) is overdone.

While it’s certainly a positive development that investors have access to low-cost vehicles that help “the little guy” bypass greedy money managers who may or may not be putting their own interests ahead of clients’ interests, we’ve reached a point where the risks are starting to outweigh the benefits.

There are myriad concerns with the continued growth of exchange-traded products including, but certainly not limited to: their still unknown effect on liquidity, the extent to which they promote indiscriminate buying/selling, the possibility that something will go wrong in the creation/destruction mechanism in a pinch, the fact that they allow retail investors to access esoteric corners of the market where those investors probably have no business being, the fact that some vehicles are pseudo-futures, and on, and on, and on.

Here’s what we said earlier this year:

This is dangerous for all manner of reasons from the rickety creation/destruction mechanism that everyone assumes is actually a streamlined miracle of financial engineering to the fact that some ETFs (most notably high yield corporate bond funds and EM bond funds) are giving investors the illusion of liquidity when in fact the market for the underlying assets is anything but liquid. And then there’s the misallocation of capital argument.

Well, with all of that in mind, consider the following brief bit from Deutsche Bank, whose Sebastian Mercado notes that we have entered “uncharted territory in ETF land” with inflows in H1 2017 very nearly outpacing inflows for any other full year on record.