Bullish flows! Or something. I don’t know. You gotta have a hook. Otherwise it’s just data for the sake of it.
For those interested, US equity-focused ETFs and mutual funds are now riding a pretty long streak of net inflows.
The latest weekly haul, $4.6 billion, made seven straight. The total inflow over that near two-month run is $46.6 billion.
For 2024 as a whole, the YTD influx to US equity funds stands at nearly $108 billion. The breakdown’s $206 billion to ETFs and $98 billion from mutual funds.
If it’s worth anything to you, both bullish and bearish sentiment are above their long-term average among US retail investors. 39% were bullish and 32% bearish in the latest AAII survey. Neutral sentiment’s below average.
Goldman’s Sentiment Indicator, which measures stock positioning across retail, institutional and foreign investors, just finished a fifth week in “stretched” territory (figure on the left, below).
BofA’s pseudo-famous “Bull & Bear Indicator,” by contrast, is a middling 5.9 even after rising meaningfully from the prior week.
If you think fundamentals matter in equities, it’s perhaps worth noting that the S&P’s forward multiple is now 21x, a level surpassed only in 2021 and 2000 looking back five decades (Info Tech’s 29x). The same’s true of the index price to book, at 4.9.
How meaningful any of this is in the context of favorable seasonality (in July), Fed fatigue and an equity market hell-bent on following Jensen Huang’s Pied Piper up the trail to new record highs, is anybody’s guess.
Note that inflows to Utilities were among the largest ever last week. That’s an AI play.
All told, global equity funds took in $10.7 billion over the latest weekly reporting period, bringing the YTD total to more than $190.49 billion ($375 billion to ETFs and $184 billion from mutual funds).
Oh, and Indian equity funds took in the most ever for a single week in the days around the country’s election.
Recall that local shares, which hit a record high in the hours ahead of the vote tally, plunged when the results showed Modi’s BJP failed to secure a majority on its own for the first time in a decade.
Indian equity funds took in $1.2 billion during EPFR’s reporting week on what BofA’s Michael Hartnett described as election dip-buying.
