Wed Apr 13 21:01:50 2016
Fund flows are important as they reflect the general investor preference for a specific asset class given current and expected economic conditions and market risk. They may also highlight non-sustainable market positioning. The ICI in the US tracks about 98% of the inflows and outflows in US mutual funds and makes its data freely available on its website. The following is a summarised report of the data it publishes every Wednesday. The first charts shows the cumulative inflows/outflows in each of the asset classes buckets since 2007
During the month of April we have seen flows of US$ -5.29Bn in Domestic equities,US$ -0.555Bn in international equities, US$ 0.373Bn in Hybrid products,US$ 5.21 Bn in taxable bond funds and US$ 1.46Bn in non taxable bond funds.
The Charts below shows the distribution of the US$ -194Bn that have flowed into US$ Mutual funds over the last 12-month.
The below charts show the monthly inflows/outflows for each type of fund and plot them both within their 95% confidence intervals and also relative to their historical distribution. This provides a level of information in respect of how “out of line” or not the current month inflows/outflows may be relative to their past history. In the distribution charts The current month is highlited in blue whereas the vertical red lines represent the 95% confidence intervals.
The chart below plot the inflows/outflows T-statistics for each of the funds cathegories considered. The Map chart provides information for period ranging from 2 years to 3 months.The greater the square the more important the inflows (green) outflows(red) over a given period.