Overnight Liquidity Update â January 29th, 2004
It does not appear that the current sell-off can last very long--at least over the very short term. So much new cash is pouring into the market that those who sold during the last few days will not want to sit on their cash for long.
Ten new offerings--nine of them secondaries--totaling $1.4 billion were announced today. As recently as last night, only seven new offerings were scheduled. The bubble will eventually burst when new offerings average $2 billion daily. The new offering calendar could surge to this level as soon as next week, but it could take a few more weeks. We have no way of knowing right now.
Yesterday Bank of America announced a more than $7 billion new stock buyback. Apart from this huge replenishment and a couple of other large ones, stock buybacks have remained scarce.
All equity mutual funds and equity exchange traded funds (ETFs) had a combined December inflow of $27.5 billion, a dramatic increase from the combined November inflow of $17.1 billion. Moreover, the January inflow into equity funds--at least into the 15 percent of all U.S. equity funds that we track daily--is far exceeding December¹s pace.
Today the Investment Company Institute (ICI) reported that all equity funds had a December inflow of $14.7 billion, $9.8 billion into U.S. equity funds and $5.0 billion into global funds. We had estimated a U.S. equity fund inflow of $13.9 billion and a global fund inflow of $10.7 billion.
In addition to the $14.7 billion inflow into all equity funds, all ETFs had a $12.7 billion inflow in December 2003, a record for new money flowing into all ETFs. Of this $12.7 billion inflow, about $11 billion flowed into U.S. ETFs and $1.7 billion into global ETFs. For comparison, all ETFs had a $2.1 billion inflow in November 2003 and about a $1 billion inflow from January 2003 through October 2003.
In December, U.S. equity funds and mostly S&P 500 index ETFs had a combined inflow of $20.8 billion. Global mutual funds and global ETFs had a combined $6.7 billion inflow.
We suspect that the massive inflow into ETFs during December was mostly from pension funds. In prior years, this money would have flowed into mutual funds. Since at least a dozen fund families have been investigated recently, perhaps pension funds are directing cash into ETFs to disassociate themselves from potential malefactors.
The ICI reported that bond funds had a December outflow of $2.9 billion. We had estimated a $6.4 billion inflow. We guess that this discrepancy was due to the recent fund scandal. Most of the bond families that we track daily and monthly have survived the scandal with their reputations intact and have probably received inflows from the bond families with outflows.
MUTUAL FUND FLOWS FOR January 28, 2004
ALL EQUITY MUTUAL FUNDS: INFLOW $1060.2 MILLION; NAV DOWN 1.5%
US EQUITY FUNDS
FLOW: INFLOW $1167.8 MILLION
BREADTH: POSITIVE 36 IN VERSUS 24 OUT
NAV: DOWN 1.5%
INTERNATIONAL EQUITY FUNDS
FLOW: OUTFLOW $107.6 MILLION
BREADTH: NEGATIVE 13 OUT VERSUS 12 IN
NAV: DOWN 1.3%
BONDS & HYBRID:
FLOW: INFLOW $341.7 MILLION
NAV: DOWN 0.5%
L1: NET FLOAT -$5,652 MILLION
NEW ANNOUNCED CASH TAKEOVERS: $88 MILLION
COMPLETED CASH TAKEOVERS: $166 MILLION
NEW STOCK BUYBACKS $7,730 MILLION
NEW OFFERINGS: $1,392 MILLION
INSIDER SELLING $800 MILLION
L2: US EQUITY FUND FLOW $1,168 MILLION
Regards,
Charles Biderman, President
TrimTabs.com Investment Research
http://www.TrimTabs.com
+1 (707) 525 1001