Wow, this is potentially cool. There's a new study out that indicates mutual funds are just large dinosaurs blithely lumbering along under a spreading meteor cloud.

According to research provider Novarica, the number of mutual funds will be essentially cut in half by 2015. (The study is summarized on the SeekingAlpha.com site by Michael Johnston of ETF Database.)

The estimates by Novarica and highlighted by Johnston are weirdly specific – from 8,022 mutual funds in 2008 down to 4,237 in 2015 – but there’s no accompanying description of how Novarica arrived at this number.

Meanwhile, the firm expects the ETF count will skyrocket from 728 in 2008 to 2,618 in 2015 (again, a very specific number), and the number of actively managed ETFs, in particular, will increase from fewer than 10 currently to 325 in 2015.

Novarica’s study projects that assets in traditional mutual funds will drop from $9 trillion to $6.75 trillion at the same time and that ETFs will see their combined assets grow from roughly $500 billion to $1.15 trillion.

According to Johnston, the report chalks this mainly up to the fact that ETFs are so much cheaper than actively managed mutual funds. But he is skeptical of the outsized projections provided by the firm, noting that the industry would have to add a total of 25 ETFs a month to meet those numbers – a clip he describes as “outrageous.”

I dunno. After having seen the insane pace of expansion the ETF industry has already achieved, I’m not sure that rate is so far out of reach. There’s a lot of newcomers – some of them major firms like Schwab, Old Mutual and Russell – lining up to enter the market in terms of providers. And should ETFs break fully into the 401(k) market soon, that could leave room for A LOT of opportunities.

I’m thinking, too, that the recent market volatility when everything tanked in late 2008 might attract investors to the immediate liquidity (i.e., trading prowess) of ETFs. I’ll bet there was a lot of teeth-gritting among investors cashing out of their mutual funds, knowing that they would get stuck with whatever the end of the day price was.

In any case, the link that Johnston provides leads to a report titled “2009 Wealth Management Overview: Top Trends in Client Segmentation, Products, and Delivery Channels,” and it costs a cool $1,500 to get a copy.

The suspense isn’t exactly killing me, so I’ll check back in 2015.