Outflows from Ucits corporate bond funds remained relatively limited during three recent financial shocks, according to the European Fund and Asset Management Association ( Efama).
The trade body analysed daily and monthly flows during three periods of market stress: the pandemic in 2020, the 2022 interest rate hikes, and the tariff-related market shock in 2025.
Outflows remained well below the stress scenarios used by the European Securities and Markets Authority, which assume withdrawals of up to 22% of assets within a week. The findings also suggest that widely cited concerns about liquidity mismatches in bond funds did not materialise during these periods.
During the pandemic, daily flows were mostly close to zero as a share of net assets, with sharp outflows only appearing occasionally. At peak volatility, around one in nine funds saw a single day of redemptions exceeding 10% of assets.
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In 2022, such large outflows were extremely rare, appearing in less than 0.3% of observations. A similar pattern held during the 2025 tariff shock, with fewer than 0.3% of observations breaching that level.
Only about one in ten funds experienced even a single day with outflows above 10% of assets. “Such evidence strongly questions the assumptions around widespread systemic outflows in open-ended funds,” said Efama.
Federico Cupelli, deputy director, regulatory policy, Efama, commented: “This analysis suggests that risk-based supervision is more effective than regulation in addressing potential liquidity mismatches in the fund sector. Instead of applying broad measures across the entire fund universe, it may indeed be more effective to focus regulatory attention on those specific groups of funds that are structurally more exposed to the risk of extreme outflows.”
