Money Movement Report

Posted on 14 April 2017 by Douglas Chadwick

On page 8 of the April 2017 newsletter, there’s a piece about some work we’ve started on looking at the movement of money into and out of funds. Here’s a copy of the article, some further commentary, and links to a couple of other reports. For some time, we’ve been trying to get a feel for the amount of money flowing into and out of the various Investment Association sectors. One of the problems with doing any Unit Trust and OEIC analysis is getting hold of the raw data. The funds are not traded on an exchange, in the way that stocks and shares are, and the only way to find out fund details is to ask the fund managers. There are a couple of companies that collate this information, but they are still reliant on the fund managers to update them. Some are better at this than others. When we started looking at fund flows we thought we could just add up the portfolio values of all the funds in each sector. We soon found out that a lot of data was missing, and so we have tried to concentrate on a ‘representative’ sample. We have taken the funds that we usually include in our weekly analysis, removed the ones without reliable portfolio size data, sorted them by fund size, and then used the top half. We have then used the same funds each week and monitored how the values have varied. There are various factors that affect the overall fund value. These are the change in value of the assets held within the fund, and the amount of money being added to, or taken out of, the fund. The next step is to see how we can split the overall movement into these two different components. In the newsletter we have shown a summary of the last three months. Here are links to a couple more reports showing the movements over recent weeks. Money Movement by value Money Movement by percentage