Retail investors return to funds in November
Risk appetite appears to tick back up; institutions withdraw huge sum from Money Markets.
In the equity realm, for example, funds pulled in a net of £1bn. Of that, £567mn went to UK All Companies, with £269mn attributable to retail investors and £327.9mn to institutions. Other top-selling sectors included UK Equity Income (£252.5mn in net sales), Global Growth (£184.4mn in net sales), and Asia Pacific excluding Japan (£112mn in net sales). Even Global Emerging Markets pulled in £81.8mn, of which £16.7mn came from retail investors. Europe ex-UK experienced the large net outflow, with £135.9mn in net outflows in November. In one notable divergence, retail investors pulled £101mn out of the Specialist sector, whilst institutions added a net £46.6mn to the group. Property funds saw net outflows of £140mn from retail investors.
Investors also added substantially to bond funds, putting in a net £434mn in the month. By far the best selling sector was £ Corporate Bond, with net inflows of £459mn, of which £339mn came from retail investors. In contrast, UK Gilts had a net outflow of £151mn. The pattern suggests that investors might finally be seeing value in the extremely wide spreads in the beaten-down corporate arena. There may also be a structural element of rebalancing as year-end approaches.
One other point of note was a massive net outflow of institutional money from the UK Money Market sector. In all, institutions pulled £1.75bn from money market funds in the November, far more than in any month during the credit crisis (the next largest institutional outflow was in June 2008, at £657.8mn).