Equity investors could not shake off their anxieties in May about the European sovereign debt crisis and what that would mean for credit markets here.
Overall, they pulled $13.2 billion out of long-term mutual funds last month, according to Morningstar, which released its fund flow update last Friday.
U.S. stock funds were the main culprit for the pullback in mutual funds. That category had a loss of $14.9 billion of assets in May, marking the largest outflow in a single month since March 2009, when the stock market hit its lowest point of the economic downturn.
Although money market funds also had outflows — $20 billion — they were down considerably, suggesting that some of the money exiting equity mutual funds sought safety instead in money market accounts.
Investors poured $4.8 billion into exchange-traded funds in May, ahead of last year's pace.
