Since both products are heavily utilized by institutional managers for cash equitization as well as trading types for short term purposes, it is not that surprising to see them consistently ranked in the top in terms of inflows nor outflows in any given week. IVV (iShares S&P 500), which is iShares alternative to the State Street product SPY, also saw impressive action last week, accumulating more than $150 million in new assets, as did a handful of fixed income products including HYG (iShares High Yield Corporate Bond) and LQD (iShares Investment Grade Corporate Bond), taking in nearly $300 million collectively.
Two sector specific equity products were also active on the inflows side, XLV (SPDR Health Care) and XLP (SPDR Consumer Staples) as it is likely that managers made some bullish tactical tilts to both sectors during the week, which are heavy individual names such as JNJ, PFE, and MRK in the case of XLV and PG, KO, and PM in the case of XLP. QQQ (PowerShares QQQ Trust), which saw heavy outflows last week largely do to AAPL’s flagging performance, lost an additional $500 million net in this past week, but most of this action occurred in the beginning of the week prior to AAPL’s bounce back above the $600 level. XRT (SPDR Retail) and XLB (SPDR Basic Materials) both lost assets last week, collectively seeing $400 million leave the funds in redemption activity as did GLD (SPDR Gold). There is not much to report in terms of notable inflows/outflows outside of the aforementioned equity and fixed income based ETFs, as commodity and currency based ETFs for example were relatively quiet on the whole last week despite the fact that the Euro really began to move in a positive direction to end the week.
FXE (CurrencyShares Euro) has been slowly trending higher versus the U.S. Dollar and is now above its 50 day moving average for the first time in about a month. Meanwhile, natural gas ETFs including UNG and NAGS for example vaulted higher last week on rising prices in the underlying futures and crude oil related ETFs such as USO and DBO for instance also grinded higher.
With the first week of May upon us in the coming trading week, we will see if the SPX has the staying power to maintain its posture north of 1400 and if expectations of volatility in the near term remain low among market participants.
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