There’s strong momentum in Canada’s exchange-traded fund (ETF) industry, with inflows well ahead of last year, suggests a new report from Toronto-based BMO Global Asset Management (BMO GAM) issued on Monday.

The Canadian ETF industry has seen inflows of $9.7 billion for the year to date as of Aug. 31, which approaches the total for all of 2014 and is significantly higher than $5.6 billion for the comparable period in 2014. Industry assets under management (AUM) as of Aug. 31 stood at $84 billion, an increase of more than 10% since the end of 2014, says the report, which is entitled Canadian ETF Outlook 2015.

Equity ETFs added $4.5 billion in inflows for the year to date as of Aug. 31, as investors used them to increase their exposure to international and U.S. equities, the report explains. Fixed-income inflows were even stronger, at $4.7 billion.

“This illustrates the diversification and liquidity benefits of fixed-income ETFs and the ability of segmented ETFs to target exposures,” the report says.

The Canadian ETF with the strongest inflows so far this year has been BMO MSCI EAFE Index ETF, which provides broadly diversified exposure to international equities markets.

According to Canadian ETF Outlook 2015, the global ETF market totalled US$2.86 trillion in AUM as of Aug. 31, and had an average annual growth rate of 24.2% during the past 10 years.

The BMO GAM report alludes to some of the ETF liquidity concerns that have been in the news, and cautioned that investors should only allocate a limited percentage of their portfolios to riskier asset classes. Even for asset classes such as bonds that trade over-the-counter, ETFs provide the benefits of “liquidity, tradability and diversification,” the report notes.

“By trading an established ETF, the natural liquidity between buyers and sellers on the exchange may make the trade more efficient,” the report says.

Rather than trying to source and trade bonds on their own, ETF investors can profit from intraday liquidity of an ETF that is tied to an underlying bond portfolio, the BMO GAM report says.

However, spreads between bid and ask prices can widen considerably for ETFs when the market becomes unbalanced, the BMO GAM report indicates. For example, during the liquidity crisis in 2007, the U.S. high-yield bond market saw trading frozen in some bonds.

Meanwhile, the BMO GAM report says U.S.-based SPDR Barclays High Yield Bond ETF, sponsored by Barclays Bank PLC, continues to trade. However, the ETF swung from a significant discount relative to its stated net asset value to a premium during this period.

This particular ETF is broadly diversified across 793 holdings, with each issuer capped at 2% of net asset value. There is concern that demand for some ETFs is driving up the prices of securities within their benchmarks and leaving behind the rest of the market, which is why diversification is important in the ETFs’ underlying portfolios, the BMO GAM report says.

“The simple answer for this observation is that a properly designed ETF diversifies across its asset class,” the report points out.