Developed market-focused equity mutual funds and ETFs shed $3.21 billion over the latest weekly reporting period, while their emerging market counterparts snapped a streak of consecutive inflows with a $728 million exodus.

Global equity fund flows are now slightly negative for 2023, according to EPFR’s data.

It’s a DM / EM divide story, but within that, it’s a tale of outflows from US equity funds, which lost another $1.5 billion in the week to May 24.

US-focused funds have now shed more than $68 billion YTD. Last week’s outflow was the sixth straight and the ninth in 10. Indeed, US funds have seen inflows during just four weeks this year.

Of course, you have to juxtapose that with inflows to Treasurys and the veritable tsunami of cash into money market funds. Inflows to US money funds re-accelerated last week, according to ICI, and EPFR’s data puts the total YTD influx globally at $756 billion.

If you’re wondering whether the equity flows story matters for stock returns, the answer is generally “yes,” although there are a lot of caveats.

The figure above gives you some long-term perspective, but the relationship between flows and performance is such that it’s notoriously difficult to disentangle one from the other. It’s a chicken-egg dilemma.

“Global equity flows are now flat YTD, in contrast to big inflows of $175 billion in 2022, $949 billion in 2021 and $182 billion in 2020,” BofA’s Michael Hartnett said, noting that this year’s cash influx puts 2023 on track to triple 2021’s haul and even surpass 2020’s $917 billion inflow.