I observed in my regular Bulls and Bears column on Tuesday that Citigroup's data tracking institutional fund movements into Singapore was not showing the type of cash inflow which one usually associated with a raging bull market.

What I had written was that even as the STI hit a seven-month, foreigners only poured a paltry net US$2.8 million into funds investing in Singapore equities last week – based on the data supplied by Citigroup.

Strange, isn't it? If the market is red-hot, you should expect the hungry hedge fund managers to be panic buying by now. Instead, they have largely stayed by the sidelines, allowing the locals to have all the fun.

Even though I made this observation at the bottom of the column, it caught the attention of many readers and a few of them sent me queries as to how to assess the Citigroup data.

I am sorry to say that I get my reports sent to me every Monday by a lady working in the bank in Hong Kong and she has been doing this for the past four years – rain or sunshine – and even when she is on holiday!

I pray for her good health every day because of the many nuggets of information thrown up by the data. It gives Straits Times readers a handle as to how foreign funds are viewing the local stock market through their investments.

Surely, it is better to track where these fund managers put their money, rather than watch one of the financial news channels which regularly parade some of them sprouting their wisdom. It is difficult to tell from the interviews whether these fund managers are really putting their money where their mouths are.

But I haven’t the faintest idea how anyone else can assess the data. Maybe, they can check with their remisiers as to whether they get similar reports from their friendly sources.

This morning, STI has fallen 41 points as I write, as it follows Wall Street lower. This appears to give credence to the bears' belief that the liquidity-induced rally is over, as troubled US lenders start to suck huge amount of cash out of the global financial system with their fund-raising frenzy, after the US government released the stress test results on them.

Like the retail investors who have been lured back into the stock market in large numbers over the past fortnight, I like to believe that we are at the start of fresh bull market. Nobody likes being the bearer of bad news and everyone likes to make money in the stock market.

But ingredients for a bull market for a small market such as Singapore will require a huge influx of foreign money to whip up a buying frenzy. The amount of local money is too small to provide such a impetus. This has held true during both the 1993 and 2007 superbull markets.

Unless the corporate governance issues thrown up by the troubled S-chips are resolved, I don't see these funds coming back to our shores any time soon to buy anything, other than the bluest of the bluest chips – and these stocks have run up sharply already.