Industry report reveals near-quadrupling of mutual fund inflows over 2020
After several years of being outsold by ETFs, Canada’s mutual fund industry saw a massive acceleration in investment inflows last year, according to the latest investment fund statistics report from the Investment Funds Institute of Canada (IFIC).
According to the report, mutual fund net sales in December totaled $879 million.
Balanced funds saw $1.5 billion in net inflows last month, a marked slowdown from $4.4 billion in November. Over the same period, equity fund net sales decelerated from $2.5 billion to $407 million. Bond funds were worst off as they went from taking in $629 million in November to losing $1.4 billion last month.
Throughout 2021, Canadian mutual funds took in a total of $112.6 billion, nearly four times as much as the $30 billion in mutual fund net sales during 2020. A large part of that was driven by balanced funds, which went from just $854 million to $62 billion in net sales, and equity funds, which grew from $6.7 billion to $37 billion in sales.
Mutual funds ended 2021 with $2 trillion in AUM, a marked increase from $1.79 trillion in November.
Meanwhile, Canadian ETFs saw $5.6 billion in net sales last month, including $3.3 billion for equity ETFs – significantly higher than the $1.9 billion in December 2020 – and $1.2 billion into bond ETFs.
Bond ETF sales surged last month, reaching $1.2 billion in December compared to just $146 million in November.
For the entirety of 2021, ETF sales totaled $58 billion, most of which came from equity ETF sales ($35 billion) and bond ETF sales ($12.3 billion).
By the end of 2021, Canadian ETFs held net assets of $347.4 billion, compared to $257 billion at the end of 2020.
