Record flows

Some signs of sentiment have eased thanks to the pullback primarily in tech stocks over the past few weeks. One that hasn't, though is fund flows. According to Lipper, flows into equity mutual funds and ETFs have averaged more than $13 billion per week over the past 5 weeks. This is a 20-year high.

The market cap of the stock market has grown over those 20 years, of course, so as a percentage of that, the total inflow over the past 5 weeks is about 0.15%. That doesn't sound like a lot but it's still among the top readings.

The table below shows S&P returns after any week where the 5-week flow exceeded 0.15% of total U.S. market cap. It didn't have much impact during the early part of 2013, but most of the others saw some shorter-term weakness.