European ETF investors added US$18.2bn of net new assets in April, despite the market volatility.
We saw significant selling of US equities in early April, while European equities recovered strongly.
European equities, defensive US equity factors, Euro government bonds, and gold may be worth considering in the current market environment.
European ETF investors displayed remarkable resilience in the extremely volatile market conditions in April. Investors added $18.2bn of net new assets to ETFs in the month with positive flows for equities ($16.8bn), fixed income ($2.2bn) and digital assets ($0.4bn) and only commodity flows (-$1.3bn) in negative territory for the month.
Within equities, we continue to see the rotation out of US exposures that we highlighted in Q1. In the week of the 7th April US equities saw the largest selling (-$5.0bn), accounting for almost 60% of total equity outflows (-$8.6bn). Flows did pick up in the rest of the month (+$4.1bn), but it was not enough to erase the earlier selling, bringing US outflows to -$1.9bn for the month. In contrast, aggregate European equities saw only modest selling in the week of the 7th (-$0.3bn) and recovered more strongly to finish the month with +$4.7bn inflows. Broad global equity exposures have also continued to see inflows in April with $5.2bn of net new assets.
Fixed income ETFs saw an unsurprising focus on safer assets with Cash Management seeing the largest inflows ($2.9bn) followed by Euro Government ($2.0bn) and US Treasuries ($1.0bn). There was selling of Corporates, High Yield and EM debt. Commodity out flows were driven by the selling of liquid assets seen in the week after the “Liberation Day” announcements as well as a degree of profit taking in Gold later in the month.
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