US MUTUAL FUND FLOWS REPORT UPDATE 18-02-2015

Wed Feb 18 15:30:28 2015

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

plot of chunk cumulative

During the month of February we have seen flows of US$ 3.51Bn in Domestic equities,US$ 2Bn in international equities, US$ 1.75Bn in Hybrid products,US$ 7.44 Bn in taxable bond funds and US$ 1.66Bn in non taxable bond funds.

plot of chunk month to date The Charts below shows the distribution in percentage terms of the US$ 63Bn that have flowed into US$ Mutual funds over the last 12-month.

plot of chunk distribution

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.

plot of chunk flowdistribution

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.

plot of chunk flowmap