As equities markets resumed their rally, new money poured into U.S.-domiciled mutual funds and ETFs.
Long-term funds gathered a total of $82.8 billion in assets in January, according to Morningstar’s latest monthly fund flows report, making it their best month since January 2018.
The biggest winners of the inflows were fixed income funds, where every Morningstar category group saw positive inflows for the month, led by taxable bond funds, which took in $63.6 billion. Municipal bond funds enjoyed $14.1 billion in inflows.
Equity funds posted mixed results. While $22.5 billion flowed out of U.S. equity funds, international funds ($18.7 billion) and sector equity funds ($3 billion) experienced positive flows.
But equity funds’ fate diverged along the actively managed, passively indexed axis. All categories of active equity funds lost assets in January, led by U.S. equity funds with more than $30 billion in outflows, while all categories of passive equity funds gained assets, led by international equity funds with $20 billion worth of inflows.
Across all funds, $16.8 billion flowed into active funds, a number easily eclipsed by the $66 billion that flowed into passive funds. No passively indexed category lost assets during the month.
Drilling down to Morningstar’s categories, fixed income dominated the inflows, comprising three of the top five categories for the month: Intermediate core bond, intermediate core-plus bond, foreign large blend, ultrashort bond and diversified emerging markets.
The categories with the most outflows came from the equity universe: Large growth, large value, small blend, mid-cap value and mid-cap growth all experienced multi-billion dollar outflows.
With the ascendancy of passive investing over active management, it should come as no surprise that Vanguard was the big winner of the month’s inflows, taking in $42.8 billion in assets during January, it’s second biggest month ever. Other leaders include BlackRock’s mutual funds and its iShares ETFs, which took in more than $17 billion combined, and Fidelity Investments, which took in $6 billion for the month.
Invesco led the firms with the heaviest outflows, experiencing $2.8 billion in net redemptions in January. The firm has experienced net outflows for 14 of the last 16 months, according to Morningstar.