Abstract: This paper studies all open-end active mutual funds investing in euro area fixed income, taking into account the relative ESG risk exposure. Working with a novel dataset, we identify short-term determinants of individual fund flows towards fixed income euro area, finding that flows significantly react to recent past returns. Sustainable fund flows further respond to government policy intervention to contain the spread of the virus and to monetary policy announcements. We measure investor timing ability with a statistic hereafter referred to as “performance gap” and we find that, regardless of the asset class, gaps remain negative and significant. Sustainable funds exhibit the worst gap respectively equal to -0.21% per year during the COVID-19 crisis and -0.31% per year in the phasing-out period from the pandemic. Moreover, computing a simple time-weighted strategy with ESG funds, we find that buying and holding the index during the COVID-19 pandemic remains superior, even after controlling for risk, providing support against a popular hypothesis.