Investors pull $43B out of stock funds
With the credit crisis intensifying, the amount of cash removed from stock mutual funds spiked higher, investors pull money out of bond funds too.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- As the nation's economic crisis deepened, investors pulled $43.3 billion from stock mutual funds, according to a report released Thursday.
The amount of money being removed from funds that invest in both U.S. and non-U.S. stocks spiked during the week ended Oct. 8, according to TrimTabs Investment Research.
Investors removed a total of $7.2 billion from equity mutual funds a week earlier.
But investors weren't just taking cash out of stock funds. TrimTabs reported that there were also big outflows from bond-based and hybrid mutual funds. Investors pulled $8.8 billion from bond funds and $4.1 billion from hybrid funds.
Over the past week, the stock market has been hammered by concerns about the credit crunch and potential for a global economic slowdown.
Conrad Gann, the chief operating officer for TrimTabs, said it appears that investors may be pulling money from the financial markets and putting it in the bank instead.
"We have some evidence [money is] going into savings and checking accounts," he said.
However, TrimTabs also said that investors continued to put more money into exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that invest in U.S. companies in the past week -- although it was a lower amount. TrimTabs reported an inflow of $4 billion into U.S. ETFs, down from $15.1 billion a week earlier.
ETFs are like mutual funds in that they own collections of stocks. But they can be bought and sold like stocks and typically have lower fees than mutual funds. 
