By Jonathan Cheng
Will 2011 be the year that investors return to the stock markets? One little number from over the quiet holiday weeks is grabbing a little more attention this morning: the Investment Company Institute’s weekly fund flow data released just a few days before the new year, showing net inflows into domestic equity mutual funds for the first time since April (!!). Yes, the number, $335 million, is puny compared to — to take one example — the previous two weeks’ outflows, which totaled $5.1 billion.
But surely this could represent a thaw in investor frostiness towards U.S. stocks, right? Right? Well, no-one’s ready to draw conclusions just yet, absent a more pronounced and sustained run than this.
“While one week does not a trend make, the move into domestic equity funds in December could be the beginning of this long predicted shift,” Dan Greenhaus over at Miller Tabak wrote. “We withhold comment until further data is in hand but this development certainly bears watching.”
The American Association of Individual Investors, in their monthly survey of asset allocation, showed little change in investor interest in equities in December. “Though individual investors are bullish about the six-month and full-year outlook for stocks, they did not increase their portfolio allocations to equities,” the AAII said.
EPFR, which also tracks fund flows, notes that while 2010 will be remembered as the year of the mega-flow into bond funds, the funds rolling into the new year with fresh momentum have a more distinctly equity-slanted flavor, including global equity, financial and tech-sector funds and even U.S. equity funds, which also showed strong inflows in the last three months of ‘10
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