Junk funds see $296.3 million inflow for week, fourth straight gain

By Paul Deckelman

New York, April 28 – High-yield mutual funds and exchange-traded funds – considered a reliable barometer of overall junk market liquidity trends – posted their fourth consecutive net inflow this week, after having seen a net outflow four weeks ago.

This week was also the 10th week in the last 11 during which more cash came into those funds than flowed out of them.

Sources familiar with the fund-flow statistics generated by AMG Data Services Inc. said on Thursday that some $296.3 million more came into those weekly-reporting-only domestic funds than left them in the form of investor redemptions during the week ended Wednesday.

This week’s inflow follows the $409.9 million net inflow reported last Thursday by the Arcata, Calif.-based unit of Thomson Reuters Corp.’s Lipper analytics division for the seven-day period ended April 20.

Before that were inflows of $84.6 million in the week ended April 13 and $1.181 billion during the week ended April 20.

Those four inflows, totaling nearly $1.972 billion, followed the $545 million net outflow recorded for the week ended March 30, which had been had been the first cash loss after six consecutive weeks of inflows, five of them of considerable size, topping the $1.5 billion mark, and several more than $2 billion.

During that six-week winning streak – lasting from the week ended Feb. 23 through the week ended March 23 – inflows totaled $13.404 billion, according to a Prospect News analysis of the figures.

One of those inflows had been the mammoth $4.967 billion cash injection during the week ended March 2 – which was not only the largest funds gain seen so far this year, easily surpassing the previous mark of $2.74 billion seen the week before that, ended Feb. 24, but was also the single largest inflow ever recorded since AMG/Lipper began tracking fund flows back in 1992. It thus surpassed the previous record-holder – the $4.25 billion inflow seen during the week ended Oct. 26, 2011.

The latest week’s inflow was the 11th gain in the 17 weeks since the start of the year, versus six outflows.

Year-to-date inflow swells

With 17 reporting weeks now in the books for 2016, the year-to-date net inflow figure rose to $9.566 billion, the Prospect News analysis indicated – a fourth consecutive new peak level for the year so far - from $9.368 billion last week, the previous zenith.

The fund flows – which started the year off with a string of outflows – reached their peak net outflow level for the year on Feb. 10, when they showed cumulative red ink of $5.165 billion.

For all of 2015, meanwhile, there were 28 inflows and 24 outflows, the analysis showed, producing a net outflow for the year of $7.046 billion.

Cumulative fund-flow estimates may be revised upward or downward or they may be rounded off and could include unannounced revisions and adjustments to figures from prior weeks.

© 2015 Prospect News.
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