How do you define outflow? Someone sells, someone else has to buy, it is a zero sum. Unless you define outflow as us retail investors, traders selling, exiting the market and professionals, brokers, mm, buying, accumulating in their inventories. In that case since professionals won't buy high and sell low, the market has nowhere to go but up. I am buying.
'equity fund outflow'.... aka redemption. the dumbness of the dumb money... they like to say 'the trend is your friend'.. but when it comes to execution, they feel a lot more comfortable with 'buy low sell high', an idea that sounds good on paper but usually doesn't work. yes for every seller there is a buyer... the participants in this game form a pyramid structure, where the bottom crowd (retail) have a lot of accounts, but constantly contribute to those sitting at the top - my pro boys....so the answer is these boys work the chip control... at the current moment looking at sentiment the dumb money is moderately bearish, therefore the direction is up.
Price movement is caused by an imbalance in liquidity. More liquidity on the asks means price will go up (and vice versa), because there are more people willing to buy at the ask than sell at the bid. Price movement is a constant process of discovering where the liquidity lies. Fundamentally, a simple process, but one that is also quite a maddening game to sus out.