© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Pedestrians walk past the London Stock Exchange in the City of London December 12, 2006. REUTERS/Stephen Hird/File Photo
By Harry Robertson
LONDON (Reuters) – British investors pulled money out of UK-focused equity funds for the third year in a row in 2023, and for the 31st consecutive month in December, data from fund network Calastone showed on Tuesday.
The figures add to the atmosphere of malaise around Britain’s stock market, which lagged far behind its U.S. and European peers in 2023 and has failed to attract big initial public offerings in recent years.
UK investors yanked 8 billion pounds ($10 billion) from British stock funds last year, after pulling out 8 billion pounds in 2022 and 1 billion pounds in 2021.
They have put 24 billion pounds into non-UK focused equity funds across the last three years, including 6.8 billion pounds in 2023, Calastone’s data showed.
Calastone’s figures, which mainly track retail investor decisions, are not comprehensive, but give a good sense of UK flows.
Britain’s benchmark has lost ground to rivals over the last five years. It rose 4% last year, compared to a 25% rally for the U.S. and a 20% gain for .
“UK stocks were a massive laggard last year,” said Ben Laidler, global markets strategist at trading platform eToro. “The UK backdrop has been essentially a stagflationary one.”
He, however, added: “It’s markets like the UK, which are very cheap, very out of favor, quite sensitive to interest rates and an economic soft landing, these are absolutely going to be the big winners for 2024.”
The government has grown concerned about the gloom over British markets, causing it to launch a set of reforms in July to make the United Kingdom more attractive for investors. A major issue has been British pension funds shunning riskier assets like stocks in favour of bond markets, something Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is keen to change.
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) equity funds had 2.4 billion pounds of outflows in 2023, the first year of net withdrawals since flows started to boom in 2019. Property funds suffered a fifth straight year of outflows.
British investors chose to put their money into cash-like money market funds in 2023, after central bank rate hikes boosted the returns available on short-dated debt and similar assets.
Money market funds took in a record 4.4 billion pounds in 2023, Calastone said, more than in the previous eight years combined.
Bond funds took in 4.8 billion pounds, almost exactly in line with the long-run average.
($1 = 0.7868 pounds)
