US loan funds post outflow of $307M for week ended Aug. 10

Losses at U.S. loan funds continued to soften this week, with an outflow of $307.2 million, versus outflows of $344.4 million last week and $832.5 million the week prior, according to Lipper.

It was the ninth straight outflow for the asset class, which has seen a total of $8.8 billion pulled from loan funds during that span. Moreover, out of the last 14 weeks, only two of those have featured any gains, and those were minor inflows of $33 million and $40 million at the beginning of June.

ETFs continued to gain momentum, adding $275.7 million this week after an inflow of $110.3 million last week, which was the first gain for the segment in seven weeks. The inflows were offset by mutual funds, which lost $582.9 million this week. Mutual funds have seen 14 consecutive weeks of outflows, totaling $9.2 billion.

The four-week moving average shifted to negative $584.7 million this week, from negative $812.7 million last week, which is a significant improvement from five weeks ago, when the four-week average was negative $1.3 billion, the deepest deficit since April 2020.

Despite the recent downturn, the year-to-date inflow remains positive, at $8.2 billion, down from $8.5 billion last week and $8.9 billion the week prior. The change due to market conditions this week was positive again, at $1.1 billion, versus $720.3 million last week. Total assets at U.S. loan funds are roughly $92.6 billion, of which $18.6 billion are in ETFs, or about 20% of the total.