For Australian equities fund managers bemoaning the difficulty in attracting investors, analysis from research house Morningstar has some cold comfort. They are far from alone.
In 2015, for the fifth consecutive year, individual investors withdrew more money from Australian shares vehicles than they injected into them. The net withdrawals only add to the misery of Australian equity managers, which are already suffering from a trend by superannuation fund clients to invest more of their members' money offshore or in so-called alternative asset classes, and to manage a portion of their local shares portfolio internally.
According to Morningstar, Australian equity managers suffered $3.1 billion of net outflows last year, bringing total net outflows to $26.2 billion since 2011. Since 2007, there have been six years where local share funds have been hit by net withdrawals. The figures, it should be noted, do not include individual mandates from large investors and so largely reflect the activities of individuals. 
Tim Murphy, Morningstar's director of fund research, attributes the decline to investors wanting to rebalance and diversify their portfolios, as well as a desire by private investors to take greater control of their financial affairs and reduce investment fees by buying Australian shares directly rather than through a fund. "The market for Australian equities managers is very challenged. It is very competitive," Murphy said.
Furthermore, any money that is heading the way of local share fund managers is going to a smaller group of them. This reflects a global trend and is partly caused by the concentration among research houses. "Funds are going to a small handful of managers. There is less diversity among the decision makers than there was 10 years ago," Murphy said.
It paints a rather grim picture for stockpickers who fancy themselves as the next Kerr Neilson, Hamish Douglass or John Sevior, all of whom have attracted billions of dollars into their funds. A glance at the top 15 performing fund managers in the three years to   May (compiled by Morningstar for AFR Smart Investor magazine) shows that only three - Hyperion Australian Growth Companies, Perpetual Wholesale Share, and Perpetual Wholesale Ethical - oversee more than $500 million of assets. Alarmingly, more than a third have less than $50 million of assets under management.
The surprise in the Morningstar data was the net $6.3 billion that local investors pulled out of international equities in 2015. But this appears to be an anomaly rather than a trend.
Last year two fund managers received requests by large clients to shift money from their main funds into individual mandates, which are not captured by the figures. In addition, in the   September quarter of 2015 individual investors, at the behest of their advisers, embarked on a portfolio rebalancing exercise, which led to the selling down of positions in outperforming global equities.
Overall, reckons Murphy, investors are still allocating money to offshore equities. "It's been a general trend of the past few years," he notes.
Back in Australian equities, it appears to be a case of winner takes all.
Fund managers that aren't popular with research houses or the in-house research teams of the large financial planning groups aren't getting much of a look in.
In theory mFund, ASX's newish platform that allows investors to buy and sell managed fund units in much the same way they trade shares, should broaden the distribution of money flowing to investment managers. It's just that not much money is flowing by way of mFund yet.
Perhaps the Morningstar data sheds some light on global asset managers' changing attitudes towards Australia. A decade ago, it was considered a must for offshore players to have a presence in the local equity market and so they dutifully established local share funds.
Not any more. These days investors would prefer to go with managers that are specialists in their field, rather than a manager that has taken a department store approach.
Goldman Sachs' decision to look at a potential sale of its Australian equities vehicle is a case in point.
"One of GSAM's key points of differentiation is its expertise in delivering global investment strategies and opportunities to investors across multiple markets," Goldman Sachs Australia chief executive Simon Rothery told staff in   May.
"In Australia, we believe this can be achieved independent of the onshore managed product business."