At this point the weekly ICI fund flow update, showing the barrage of redemption requests no matter what the market does, is a moot point, but we will do it anyway: in the week ended December 21, when the market was doing its usual Santa rally antigravitational acrobatics and rising on the now denied hope that the European LTRO would be the Hail Mary pass of 2011, investors in domestic equity mutual funds pulled another $2.7 billion, leaving funds with even less dry powder, with even less ability to lever up, and with an even lower margin of error to any sharp pull backs in stocks. To date, and with just one week left in, investors have withdrawn a whopping $135 billion from equity mutual funds, which we are 100% certain is an all time record for any year in which the S&P closed even nominally positive for the year, proving that nobody believes this farce known as a market any longer. But we all know that... In further detail, investors withdrew funds for 34 of 35 consecutive weeks, have withdrawn $19 billion in the past month alone, and their flows show no indication of any sort of market correlation any longer, indicating that no matter how high the "powers that be" push stocks, retail no longer cares, and will not chase "performance" especially when said performance is 100% fraud and manipulation.
