On the heels of a near $65 billion two-week bonanza, inflows to global equity funds decelerated sharply over the latest weekly reporting period.
Stock-focused ETFs and mutual funds took in $5 billion, bringing the YTD net running sum to $457 billion — so, let’s call it half a trillion.
As the figure below reminds you, buyers were back with a vengeance in and around the September FOMC meeting, as investors poured money into equities for two weeks straight after a modest net redemption earlier in the month, only the sixth of 2024.
The split for this year is $761 billion to ETFs and $304 billion from mutual funds. The breakdown for the most recent week was a stark reminder of just how one-sided (or maybe I should say “one-for-one”) the active-to-passive shift really is. Equity ETFs saw $25 billion of inflows, while long-only mutual funds saw $21 billion of outflows.
Notably, US-focused stock funds saw one of the largest net redemptions of 2024 over the past week, a $9.7 billion exodus. That came on the heels of nearly $45 billion in net buying over the prior two weeks.
The figure below shows you the week-by-week regional breakdown of global equity flows for this year. Note that the inflow to EM for last week (in green) was $15.5 billion, the second-largest ever. Zooming in, the $14 billion inflow to Chinese-focused funds was likewise the second-largest ever (“buy the stimmy”).
For 2024, US funds have seen a net $263 billion of inflows, EU funds $40 billion of net selling, Japanese shares $19 billion of buying and EM funds $135 billion of buying with $114 billion of that attributable to China.
Elsewhere on the flows front, IG bonds took in $10 billion (it’s been nearly a year since the last weekly outflow), junk saw an eighth straight inflow and cash took in $13 billion globally.
Speaking of cash, the latest ICI update showed US money market funds took in nearly $39 billion in the week to October 2.
As the figure shows, that was a solid encore from the prior week’s monumental $121 billion haul.
For 2024, US MMF AUM is up $577 billion. Total AUM now stands just short of the $6.5 trillion mark.
That’s a lot of dry powder.
