Flight of investors

Mutual funds lost a record 3 billion rubles in a week

Open-end mutual investment funds (UIFs) lost almost 3 billion rubles last week, the National League of Managers told Interfax-AFI. According to experts, this is a record for the size of the outflow of funds from shareholders in such a short period. At the same time, they do not find economic justification for the flight of investors, because the stock market is growing in October. They suggest that this movement of funds was the initiative of some large investors who were afraid of high volatility and tried to use the historical highs reached by the market during this period to take profits.

Equity funds lost the largest amount of funds, from which 2.4 billion rubles were withdrawn over the week. Mixed investment funds lost 239 million rubles, stock index funds - 93 million rubles, 14 million rubles were withdrawn from bond funds, and slightly less than 7 million rubles from funds of funds. The only type of funds that remained in the black at the end of the week were money market funds - the inflow to them amounted to 9.8 million rubles. The leader in terms of the volume of withdrawn funds was LUKOIL Fund First, which lost almost 1.6 billion rubles.

As market participants note, the previous large outflow of funds was recorded in July, when, in the wake of the market decline, about 1.5 billion rubles were withdrawn from open mutual funds in a month. In April, the outflow amounted to almost 2 billion rubles. As experts point out, it was to a large extent connected with the ongoing IPO of VTB Bank, for the sake of participation in which shareholders withdrew money from mutual funds.

However, the market is currently growing, the RTS and MICEX indices are setting new highs. Over the past week, an outflow of funds was observed in almost all types of open-end funds, which indicates that shareholders did not move from one mutual fund to another, transferring funds to more profitable instruments, but simply took money. These facts caused extreme surprise among specialists.

“I doubt that this is possible,” says Renaissance Capital analyst Avanes Aganesyan. “The first thing that comes to mind is that some market participants decided that at this moment it was possible to exit with a profit, given the high volatility of the market.”

“Last week we were at highs in stock indices,” notes Stanislav Kleshchev, an analyst at the investment department of VTB-24. - Perhaps some large investors were pursuing the goal of fixing profits. Mutual funds have large shareholders who largely shape market conditions; the exit of one or two such players can lead to a large outflow of funds.” Mr. Kleshchev does not believe that there is a need to look for a deeper meaning or trend here: “It is unlikely that investors pursued speculative goals, perhaps they just needed money.”

According to Vadim Soskov, managing director of Aton Management, there are several reasons for the outflow of funds from funds. Firstly, speculative investors, seeing signs of market growth in early October, rushed to take profits, fearing a possible correction. If so, then they rushed to withdraw their money - this week stock indices updated their historical highs several times. Secondly, he believes, a simple sale of shares could also have taken place.

Nikolay KOCHELYAGIN