Equities stumbled a bit in recent days and Wall Street was on track to notch its first weekly decline in seven. Blame pre-election jitters in the US, lingering trepidation about the Chinese economy and a fairly sharp rise in Treasury yields.

Despite the anxiety, folks were still buying stocks. On net, anyway.

Global stock funds took in $4 billion over the latest weekly reporting period, according to EPFR. That was the smallest weekly inflow since a redemption early last month.

The four-week rolling pace slipped to $70 billion. As the updated figure above makes clear, outflows are a rarity in 2024.

For the year as a whole, global equity funds have seen $521 billion of inflows. The breakdown’s $846 billion to ETFs and $324 billion from mutual funds.

This week’s inflow came courtesy of US-focused funds, which took in more than $6 billion. Recall that last week saw the fourth-largest inflow of the year, a $23 billion haul.

YTD, US funds are approaching $300 billion of inflows.

The most notable takeaway from this week’s flows data was a second consecutive exodus from Chinese shares. China-focused products lost $6.7 billion. That comes atop a $4 billion outflow the prior week.

Of course, Chinese equities saw record buying earlier this month on stimulus bets. Between last week and this week, a fourth of the mammoth $40 billion one-week buying spree witnessed at the beginning of October has cashed out.

As the figure above, from BofA, shows, the apparent profit-taking constituted the largest one-week outflow from Chinese shares since the bubble burst in the summer of 2015.

Those redemptions, in turn, were behind a $7.2 billion outflow from emerging market-focused funds as a cohort. It was the largest one-week selling impulse since April of 2020, when the world was ending.

Elsewhere on the flows front, money market funds continued to rake it in. This is such a broken record that it hardly bears mentioning. ICI’s data showed another $40 billion of inflows to US MMFs, pushing total AUM above $6.5 trillion (see the figure below).

To some strategists, that looks like “dry powder” — a source of funds for a year-end equity melt-up. Others have suggested it’ll be a while — nine months or so following the first Fed cut if past is precedent — before that cash starts to find its way into riskier assets.

In the meantime, that mountain of money sure is generating a lot of monthly interest income. $6.5 trillion is still earning some of the highest USD cash rates in decades.

I continue to believe that income stream goes a long was towards explaining why the best US companies and the richest US households remain big spenders nearly three years on from the most aggressive Fed-hiking campaign in a generation. If some of that spending is part and parcel of still-elevated services inflation, then high rates are paradoxically a source of upside consumer price risk.