The inflows were the first in three weeks. Funds that specialize in U.S. shares attracted most of the new cash, at $12.6 billion, while funds that specialize in foreign shares attracted $1.6 billion to reverse the prior week's $1.1 billion in outflows.
Exchange-traded fund investors plowed almost $6.7 billion into the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust
"I suspect bargain hunters bought up financial services ETFs. With a fall of 2 to 5 percent this week, it certainly wasn't performance chasing," said Jeff Tjornehoj, head of Americas Research at Lipper, a Thomson Reuters company.
The Financial Select Sector SPDR Fund (>> Financial Select Sector SPDR (ETF)) XLF was down 2.3 percent, Tjornehoj added.
Taxable bond funds attracted $3.1 billion, reversing the prior week's outflows of $4.6 billion. Funds that specialize in U.S. Treasuries attracted $1.2 billion to mark their biggest inflows since mid-April.
U.S.-based money market funds attracted $12.2 billion of inflows in the latest week, their biggest since mid-May, Lipper added.
Outside of the United States, Chinese stock funds posted $171 million of outflows, their biggest withdrawals since April 2014, against the backdrop of the 30-percent slump in Chinese shares since mid-June.
The weekly Lipper fund flow data is compiled from reports issued by U.S.-domiciled mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.
(Reporting by Sam Forgione; Editing by James Dalgleish and Jennifer Ablan)
By Sam Forgione