‘Total Risk Surrender:’ Record $29.5 billion yanked from stock funds
Published: Aug 28, 2015 7:35 a.m. ET
This ‘capitulation’ possibly led to rally as week progressed
Investors pulled a record amount of money out of stock funds in the week ended Wednesday, signaling “Total Risk Surrender,” as a Bank of America Merrill Lynch note puts it.
Equity funds saw $29.5 billion head for the exits, the largest weekly outflow on record, the note said, citing data going back to 2002.
This massive exodus perhaps set the stage for the stock market’s big gains on Wednesday and Thursday. It was “capitulation,” the BofA note said, using a term that refers to so much selling that a bottom can be formed. The bank talked about capitulation last week for emerging markets, commodities and energy-related stocks.
Huge one-day outflow: Beyond the weekly data, there’s this stunning point: Investors pulled more money out of stocks funds in one day during the past week — Tuesday — than they did in any day in roughly the last eight years, as the chart below shows.
Tuesday’s outflow was $19 billion, according to the latest “Flow Show” note dated Thursday from the Bank of America Merrill Lynch investment strategy team led by Michael Hartnett.
Anyone who joined in Tuesday’s stampede for the exits missed out on the stock market’s big rally on Wednesday and Thursday — perhaps a classic case of selling at the bottom, or recency bias.
Or the market selloff might not be over, as MarketWatch’s Anora Mahmudova points out here, so those that got out still could end up patting themselves on the back. U.S. stock futures ESU5, -0.15% were dropping again early Friday.
More pain ahead for Chinese stocks? A separate BofA note is sounding an alarm about Chinese stocks, arguing that the recent reprieve in selling is just that — a short break.
“As soon as people sense the government is withdrawing from direct intervention, there will be lots of investors starting to dump stocks again,” said David Cui, China equity strategist at Bank of America in Singapore, according to a Bloomberg story about that call.