Investors Pulled $29 Billion in October, Most in Three Years From Funds

(Bloomberg) — Investors pulled more money out of stock and bond funds in October than in any month in more than three years.

Mutual and exchange-traded funds had net redemptions of $29.1 billion last month, the biggest outflows since August 2015, according to a report Tuesday by Morningstar. The data exclude money-market funds.
The rout in global markets is turning investors cautious. The S&P 500 Index fell nearly 7 percent in October and the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Aggregate Index lost 0.8 percent. Yet fixed-income funds were hit worse than equities, Morningstar said.

Taxable bond funds experienced $14.2 billion in redemptions, their worst performance in almost three years, while equity funds had outflows of $2.2 billion. Active funds experienced $46 billion in redemptions, the most since December 2016, and passive funds brought in $16.9 billion, the data show.

Read more: Investors Are Shifting Capital as Markets Get Rattled
The October outflows were the most severe since the summer of 2015, the last time the U.S. equity market was in a correction, Morningstar analyst Kevin McDevitt wrote.