The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) registered $40.41 million of net foreign portfolio investments or hot money outflows in February, reversing the $40.06 million net inflows same time in 2020.
Gross outflows reached $1.378 billion while gross inflows totalled $1.337 billion. About 39.8 percent of funds were invested in listed securities such as banks, property companies, holding firms, food, beverage and tobacco companies and telecommunication services firms. Another 60.2 percent went to peso government securities.
In February, the top five investing countries with 83.1 percent of hot moneys are the United Kingdom, Singapore, US, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
For this year, the BSP expects net hot money inflows to reach $5.7 billion and in 2022, to expand to $7.4 billion. In 2020, the BSP registered $4.24 billion net hot money inflows.