U.S. stocks at the end of March posted their best quarter in nearly a decade, but they did so without help from investors in U.S. stock mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. For the quarter, the S&P 500 rose 14 percent, and has added another 1.9 percent so far this month.
But individual investors seem to be leaving the stock market. U.S. equity funds posted outflows of $39.1 billion in the first quarter, according to a Bank of America analysis of EPFR data. So why do prices keep going up?
The divergence between outflows and outsize gains can be partly explained by corporate buybacks, as S&P 500 firms have repurchased $227 billion of their own stock in the first quarter of 2019, according to FactSet data. That's up from $143 billion in the first quarter of 2018. But that can't account for all of this year’s rally, which has seen the total market capitalization of the S&P 500 rise by $2.96 trillion.
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