Selling Pressure in US Equities – Is Corporate Activity enough to support?

From start to finish February was a month of US Equity downwards pressure by many measures. Whether it be the record level of mutual fund (MF) and ETF outflows (-$42bn) and net futures selling (-$31bn) in the first three weeks of the month, or the S&P 500 ending February down 3.9%, despite recovering close to half of the start-of-month falls - February’s activity was decidedly that of sellers. The combined amount of outflows and futures selling (-$73bn) is close to double the $40 billion peak selling volumes we last saw in 2008, 2011 and 2016 according to recent research from UBS. ¹

However,...