New York -- On Friday, after Bill Gross quit Pimco and the Total Return Fund he had run for 27 years, California-based EP Wealth Advisors decided to pull the plug that same day. Ending its investment in Total Return left it with $130 million in uninvested assets and one weekend to decide what to do with it.

"We assumed with that level of assets our due diligence process was not going to get done in three days, so we needed a place to park the money temporarily," said Kevin Ashworth, the firm's investment director. EP had invested in Total Return for more than a decade, and it was the firm's largest fixed income position.

On Monday, the firm moved the entire sum into BlackRock Inc's iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF. It was a way to keep exposure to the bond market while buying time to search for a new manager and "better than being in cash, which is earning zero," Ashworth said.

The move by Ashworth and other investors who withdrew money from Total Return on Friday helped drive the iShares ETF on Monday to a record trading volume of $791 million, more than five times its daily average. The ETF has $19 billion in assets.

The shift underscores how important easily traded exchange-traded funds have become for active investors, especially during market tumult.

Money managers use ETFs as short-term shelters during broad market disruptions and for transitional moves between asset classes or investment companies, said Matt Tucker, head of the iShares fixed-income strategy team at BlackRock, the largest U.S. ETF provider.

Tucker said his firm saw a surge in temporary money piling into iShares ETFs over the last week as investors contemplated their next move. The ETF is up 0.53 percent since Friday, according to Lipper.

ETFs trade on stock exchanges throughout the day and offer fast-trading investors the time and space to be reflective, but they also raise questions about whether their use as parking lots adds risk and volatility to markets or instead makes them run more smoothly.

As ETF trading volume accelerates, amid a decline in the trading of the underlying corporate bond market, it gives investors improved liquidity and a better read on fixed-income prices during periods of market volatility, Fitch Ratings said in a May report.

"You are basically moving from one pool of bonds to another pool of bonds, and the market absorbs those kinds of moves intra-day pretty quickly," said Dave Nadig, chief investment officer of research and analytics firm ETF.com.

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