Investors poured money into international equity ETFs in the past week and, once again, flows into the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index Fund (NYSEArca: EEM) were a prominent feature of the week.

Overall, investors plowed $3.86 billion into ETFs in the week ended Thursday, Dec. 6, with $2.67 billion of that in international equity, according to data compiled by IndexUniverse. Total U.S-listed ETF assets rose to $1.317 trillion—just shy of the all-time record of $1.318 trillion set in October— from $1.312 trillion in the prior week.

The asset gains were helped by the Dow Jones industrial average’s gain of 52 points, or 0.4 percent, in the same five-day period ended Thursday.

EEM gathered $908.9 million, and total assets in the fund ended the period at almost $42.6 billion. The Vanguard MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (NYSEArca: VWO) meanwhile had negligible inflows and its assets ended the week at nearly $58 billion.

The flows are the latest sign investors have been pouring money back into EEM since The Vanguard Group’s announcement in early October that it planned to change indexes on VWO to a benchmark from FTSE. In that vein, EEM was the single most popular ETF in all of November.

Some ETF industry sources have argued that the positive flows for EEM relative to VWO—essentially a reversal of a broad pattern of the past few years—might be related to the fact that institutions still largely favor MSCI benchmarks. That would mean VWO could be falling out of favor among such large investors, no matter how smoothly it trades.

Another feature of the past week was broad outflows from a number of Vanguard funds—much as we predicted would be the case last week, when many of those same funds had exceptionally strong inflows.

Those asset movements don’t appear to be inflows or outflows in the usual sense, but rather reflect adjustments around twice-yearly rebalancing of MSCI indexes, as Stifel Nicolaus said in an analyst note this week.

“Twice per year, MSCI rebalances its indices, and during this process the Vanguard funds create new shares temporarily (with the authorized dealer) and then reverse the trades within days through fund redemption and in-kind exchange of stocks,” Stifel Nicolas analyst Jeffrey Hopson said in the report.

The week’s least popular fund, the Vanguard Mid-Cap ETF (NYSEArca: VO), was at the very center of the phenomenon Hopson described, with redemptions of $1.39 billion. Those redemptions followed VO creations in the prior week amounting to $1.4 billion—a perfect illustration of such phantom flows from Vanguard.

Vanguard has been mostly reticent on the subject, acknowledging that the flows are related to period rebalancings, but declining to elaborate. 

Top 10 Creations (All ETFs)

Top 10 Redemptions (All ETFs)

ETF Weekly Daily Flows By Asset Class

Top 10 Volume Surprises, Funds >$50 mm AUM

Top 10 Weekly Performers, Excluding Leverage/Inverse Funds and <1,000 Shares Traded

Top 10 YTD Performers

Bottom 10 YTD Performers

Disclaimer: All data as of 6 a.m. Eastern time the date the article is published. Data is believed to be accurate; however, transient market data is often subject to subsequent revision and correction by the exchanges.