[tmerr]

Probably cherry-picked stats. The article says "Investors have poured almost $900 billion into equity exchange-traded and long-only funds in 2021". So does that sum together to all "Stock"? What about mutual funds? And what even are long-only funds, are those popular?

https://web.archive.org/web/20211125175105/https://www.bloom...

[voisin]

Long only just means they don’t have short positions that would gain from a market downturn. I.e. they aren’t hedging.

[tmerr]

Thanks. It might include more than I expected, but still "exchange-traded and long-only funds" would be missing anything that's not considered a fund, like individual stocks, that are still nonetheless in my mind part of "Stocks" in aggregate. Maybe they account for this, maybe not, it's really hard to understand without real sources in the article. All it really says it is some BofA report without any link to it.

[nkohari]

ETFs represent an aggregation of many individual stocks, though, so money flowing into ETFs (indirectly) means money flowing into individual stocks.

[tmerr]

Sure. But without every piece of the pie accounted for we can't tell whether the increase in money to funds is representative of the whole, or caused by shifting preferences

[dsizzle]

Which is to say, yes, they're popular -- they're the vast majority of stock funds.