The winners of the second annual Morningstar Awards for U.S. exchange-traded funds and ETF providers were announced today at the firm’s annual ETF Invest Conference in Chicago.

The awards recognize winners for two classes of investing objectives: "Investor" and "Trader." Morningstar identified Investor and Trader class winners across 40 ETF categoriess, with the winners being those highest ranked versus its peers in terms of total cost of ownership and risk-adjusted returns.

In this year’s awards, iShares had 31 category winners and Vanguard received 23.

The winners for Best ETF Providers in four U.S. category groups are:

• International Stock: iShares
• Sector Stock: Vanguard
• Taxable Bond: iShares
• U.S. Stock: iShares

“The most notable move we saw this year was iShares replacing Vanguard as the best ETF provider in the U.S. stock category group, though the change had nothing to do with performance or cost. Vanguard’s benchmark index changes, announced late in 2012, disqualified many of the firm’s U.S. stock ETFs from consideration under our methodology,” said Ben Johnson, Morningstar’s director of global passive funds research.

A full list of the Morningstar ETF category winners in the Investor and Trader classes is available at: http://advisor.morningstar.com/products/conference/etfinvest_awards.asp.