Over half of the investors in the survey, which was carried out independently for Lyxor, the ETF arm of France's Societe Generale, said they expect ETP assets to grow by more than 10 per cent. One in five said they expected them to grow by 30 per cent.

Only 7.6 per cent of investors think that the market will fall in the next three years, according to the research, for which 131 fund managers based in the UK and Ireland were interviewed.

Moreover, the study found that seven out of ten think equity ETPs will see the biggest increase in assets under management over the next three years followed by the commodity and fixed income areas. By contrast, iShares, the ETF giant owned by BlackRock, has recently highlighted the growth prospects of fixed income ETFs, which it predicts will grow from $302 billion globally today to over $2 trillion in the next decade. In a recent interview with this publication, David Bower of iShares even suggested that fixed income ETFs could become bigger than equity ETFs in the next three to five years, despite the fact that they only make up 18 per cent of the total global market today.