Asset flows in 2012

Investor money continues to flow out of equity mutual funds.

Salman Ahmed, CFA 5 February, 2013 | 7:00PM Joanne Xiao
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Salman Ahmed: We are looking at asset flows for the year 2012, and we'll start with ETF assets. ETF products, in general, receive net asset inflows over the year of $12 billion, and this was across both equity and fixed income categories. Fixed income inflows were at $6.2 billion, while equity inflows were at $5.5 billion, and this is not very similar to the mutual fund space.

Joanne Xiao: Yeah. Unfortunately, we continue to see investor's money flowing out of equity mutual funds and into bond funds in 2012.

Ahmed: Yeah. This goes against some of the research that has been done showing that investors tend to chase returns. If you look at the equity indices performance since 2009 –the MSCI World, S&P 500, S&P/TSX Composite – have all handily outperformed the DEX Universe, which is the broad fixed income benchmark over the last three years.

So, it goes against some of the broad research that has been done on this topic. And one of the theories behind why this continues to be the case – why equity funds continue to receive outflows – is a lack of trust that investors have in the markets stemming from what happened in 2007 and 2008. And until that trust is regained by the investor, we expect there to be continued outflows in these equity funds.

Xiao: Yeah. And also the largest of this inflow into bond fund went into the Canadian fixed income category. And well so, basically it's your traditional investment grade intermediate term type of core bond fund, there was more than two times of the asset that went into the Canadian fixed income category in 2012, than the one that received the second largest inflow. And interestingly, there was 3.3% return from the Canadian fixed income category in 2012 compared to the 7.3% return from Canadian focused equity category.

Ahmed: I mean another product that has experienced very strong inflows has been the fund of funds and wrap product over the last – especially over the last year, but it's an ongoing trend.

Xiao: Yeah. Indeed we saw there is $25 billion asset that went into the fund of funds product in 2012, and you mentioned earlier there is only $12 billion of that in the ETF space. So, it is a trend that we've observed for the last couple of years except 2008 and 2009.

Ahmed: Thanks Joanne. For more information on this and other investment topics, please visit our website at www.morningstar.ca.

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About Author

Salman Ahmed, CFA

Salman Ahmed, CFA  Salman Ahmed, CFA, is an associate director of active manager research with Morningstar Canada.

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