The following companies on the PWH register provide global ETFs, but it pays to note that most of them also lend some of their shares out to people who want to short stocks, as required, it's a secondary income stream for them.
ETF managers:
The primary driver of buying and selling from those 4 ETF providers remains passive fund flows, so as people buy and sell their ETF units, their market makers are buying and selling the underlying shares so that the ETFs hold the right number of shares to correspond to their units on issue. ETFs are all open-ended, so the number of units grows and shrinks along with demand.
At least two of those companies also manage discretionary actively managed funds - Blackrock (the world's largest asset manager) and State Street - so they may also buy and sell additional shares for those actively managed funds meaning they are taking a view on the company, but the vast majority of their buying and selling is for the ETFs that they manage (so regarded as "passive" rather than "active" money flows), and that demand is entirely driven by people entering and exiting those ETFs, or increasing or decreasing their exposure to those ETFs.
