Don’t look now, but global equities just saw their first weekly outflow since April.
$3.7 billion in redemptions from long-only mutual funds more than offset $2.1 billion of inflows to equity-focused ETFs, leaving a net outflow over the latest weekly reporting period, according to EPFR.
The $1.6 billion leak hardly counts as an exodus, but as the figure below shows, it’s notable as the first outflow in 22 weeks.
For the year, global equity funds have seen a net $388 billion of inflows. The split’s $658 billion to ETFs and $269 billion from mutual funds.
Remarkably, there are only six weekly outflows YTD a testament, I suppose, to the dip-buying resolve of a “diamond hand”-ed retail set. Of course, dips were few, shallow and far-between over the first eight months of the year, and the April pullback did see meaningful redemptions. But flows refused to cooperate with seasonality that said August should’ve been challenging on the flows front. Instead, investors snapped up “bargains” in the wake of the mini-panic which found the S&P down 9% or so from the highs at the August 5 nadir.
US-focused funds saw more than $6 billion of outflows over the latest week, according to the same EPFR update.
As the figure shows, that was the biggest outflow since the April swoon. It was also the second in a row. That takes the YTD cumulative inflow to US-focused stock funds down to $227.6 billion.
Elsewhere (i.e., across assets), IG bonds ran their remarkable inflow streak to 46 weeks, while cash took in more than $30 billion globally.
ICI data released earlier this week showed US MMFs took in another $23 billion, pushing total AUM beyond $6.3 trillion. Bulls still contend that some of that sideline cash will eventually find its way into riskier assets, including stocks, if and when the macro-policy coast ever clears.
