Recently the Investment Company Institute (www.ici.org) released May statistics on fund flows for mutual funds and exchange traded funds. Here’s what we gleaned from the May and prior months’ numbers:
Assets held in mutual funds and ETFs have risen dramatically since the end of February, owing to a combination of appreciation in market value and net capital inflows (net share creations).
In May both ETFs and mutual funds extended their asset growth at rates similar to March and April. For the three month period, ETF assets grew by 29% vs. 22% for non-money market mutual funds.
Interestingly, roughly 20% of ETF asset growth during the period was due to net capital inflows into ETFs, whereas only about 7% was due to net new share creations in mutual funds.
Also worth noting, 95% of March/April/May net mutual fund share creations were in the form of bond funds. 46% of ETF share creations were of the bond variety.
| Assets, Share Creations | Mutual Funds | ETFs | |||||
| (billions of dollars) | |||||||
| Month | Month | ||||||
| Non- | on | on | |||||
| Money | Money | Month | Month | ||||
| All | Market | Market | Chg | All | Chg | ||
| Feb | 9,038 | 3,890 | 5,148 | 450 | |||
| Mar | 9,249 | 3,816 | 5,433 | 5.5% | 482 | 7.2% | |
| Apr | 9,700 | 3,792 | 5,909 | 8.8% | 530 | 9.9% | |
| May | 10,074 | 3,767 | 6,307 | 6.7% | 582 | 9.9% | |
| Change, 2/28 – 5/31 | 1,036 | (123) | 1,159 | 132 | |||
| 11.5% | -3.2% | 22.5% | 29.4% | ||||
