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Traders cannot cease piling up money, with property in cash market funds ballooning to a file $5.3 trillion.
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The surge in money comes amid a combo of excessive rates of interest and depressed investor sentiment in the direction of the inventory market.
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However that huge pile of money may very well be the gasoline wanted to drive the subsequent bull market rally.
Traders are hoarding money at file ranges and there isn’t any signal of the pattern reversing amid excessive rates of interest and depressed investor sentiment in the direction of the inventory market.
Cash market fund property have ballooned to a file $5.3 trillion, with inflows surging by $588 billion over the previous ten weeks, in response to a latest word from Financial institution of America.
That surge in money held by buyers got here amid a flight-to-safety sparked by the regional banking disaster, wherein three banks with mixed property of almost $550 billion collapsed over a two-month interval.
The latest fund circulate surge into cash market funds eclipsed the $500 billion fund inflows seen after the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008, and was about half that of the $1.2 trillion that flooded cash market funds throughout the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A part of the explanation why buyers are stocking up on money is to make the most of a excessive risk-free fee of return of simply over 4%. Another excuse is as a result of buyers are downright bearish on shares.
In AAII’s most up-to-date investor sentiment survey, which asks buyers the place they suppose the inventory market can be in six months, bearish responses surged to 45% over the previous week, which is a traditionally excessive studying for the 30+ year-old survey. The historic common for bearish responses is 31%.
In the meantime, solely 24% of respondents had been bullish on shares, which suggests that almost all buyers are struggling to discover a good cause to speculate their cash into equities amid the heightened uncertainty tied to the continuing banking disaster.
And Fundstrat’sTom Lee agrees. That’s, if the banking disaster continues to spiral uncontrolled. In a Friday word, Lee advised buyers that “this can be a powerful time to argue including threat” given the latest collapse of First Republican Financial institution and the acute volatility seen in PacWest Bancorp and Western Alliance Bancorp.
“This raises too many tail threat points together with credit score tightening, industrial actual property and extensive financial implications,” Lee mentioned. And but, Lee nonetheless sees a balanced threat/reward setup for the inventory market because the banking sector exhibits indicators of stabilizing and earnings outcomes maintain up better-than-expected.
And if ongoing developments within the banking sector, financial system, and inventory market flip better-than-expected, then there is a huge $5.3 trillion pile of money that would act as gasoline to drive the subsequent bull market in shares. That is as a result of, in response to Lee, a lot of the money that is been constructed up over the previous couple of years was withdrawn from the inventory market.
“Retail liquidations of S&P 500 and Nasdaq shares exceeds [retail’s] purchases since 2019,” Lee advised Insider on Friday, referencing information from Goldman Sachs.
“I believe shares are flat vs. [a] yr in the past and sentiment far worse and there may be far more money on [the] sidelines. So there may be positively [a] flows story that would unfold,” Lee mentioned. Lee set his 2023 year-end worth goal at 4,750, about 15% greater than present ranges.
If that huge money pile begins to unwind, buyers have few choices on the place to place it, and the inventory market is probably going a best choice.
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