Stocks might’ve stumbled recently, but inflows continue unabated. On net, anyway.

Global equities headed into an eventful stretch — there’s a tsunami of scheduled data releases, a Fed meeting and potentially pivotal policy gatherings in London and Tokyo — nursing consecutive weekly losses, even as investors plowed ever more money into stock funds.

The latest weekly haul, $22.2 billion, marked the 14th straight.

As the figure shows, last week’s inflow counted among the largest of the year and it came hot on the heels of 2024’s second-biggest influx.

Global equity funds have now seen more than $322 billion of net inflows in 2024. The breakdown’s $554.3 billion to ETFs and $231.6 billion from mutual funds.

One concern going forward is that inflows for Q3 were front-loaded. Equity funds took in more than $80 billion over the past three weeks alone. I touched on this late last week in “Dog Days, August Bears.”

The figure above shows inflows to equity funds in H1 of 2024 were the highest for any first half on record other than 2021, year of meme stocks, “stimmy” and some of the wildest speculation in modern market history (e.g., Bored Ape Yacht Club).

The poorest month of the year for inflows is right around the corner. “Passive inflows into target date and retirement funds have been one of the key pillars of this flow-of-funds move into equities [and] this pauses a bit in August,” Goldman’s Scott Rubner reiterated. “Allocations are full.”

The figure below, from Rubner, is worth a mention. It depicts historical flows into (or out of) US equity-focused ETFs and mutual funds in the one-year period before and after US presidential elections, as a share of AUM.

The sample’s small (n=5) but this year’s atypical: Equity funds generally see outflows in the 12-month period leading into elections.

By contrast, US stock funds have seen inflows amounting to around 1% of AUM over the past eight or so months.

Last week, those funds took in around $8 billion, bringing the YTD haul to $199 billion.