What does cash flow mean in this context?

[Tom_Scud]

@John Bogle in the Wall Street Journal

The idea that passive equity management could outpace active management—then the mutual fund industry’s universal strategy—was derogated and ridiculed. The fund, now called the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, was referred to as “Bogle’s Folly.” Yet today indexing has come to dominate the field. Over the past five years, index funds have accounted for 100% of all equity funds’ cash flows, with assets now totaling $2 trillion, one-fourth of all equity fund assets.

link

My naive reading of that would be “100 percent of all funds went into index funds”, which can’t possibly be true.

Is that supposed to mean that the money coming in to and going out of actively managed funds was a NET of zero, with the money coming in balanced by the money being withdrawn or transferred into other investments? Thus, the index funds accounted for 100% of the net (incoming) cash flow.

Or am I somehow way off base here?

[nivlac]

@Tom_Scud

Is that supposed to mean that the money coming in to and going out of actively managed funds was a NET of zero, with the money coming in balanced by the money being withdrawn or transferred into other investments? Thus, the index funds accounted for 100% of the net (incoming) cash flow.

Link requires a subscription. Your interpretation sounds reasonable to me. Only the index funds (in total) have had net positive deposits.

[Tom_Scud]

Weird about the subscription; I don’t think my workplace has one and I got there just by googling a quote from the story and clicking through.