Over 4.5 million private investors now trading on MOEX

The number of individuals with a brokerage account on Moscow Exchange reached 4.57 million at the beginning of April, an increase of 320,000 over March and up by 713,000 year to date. In 2019, an average of 159,000 individual accounts were opened every month .

606.7 thousand retail investors executed at least one trade in March, compared to 244.9 thousand per month on average for 2019.

According to MOEX’s monthly Individual Investment Indicator analytical report, private investors traded a total of RUB 43.7 bln worth of Russian shares on MOEX in March, double the maximum monthly buying volume in 2019 (calculated as the difference between the total buying and selling volumes traded by individual clients).

Moscow Exchange provides an anonymised overview of the activity of private investorsin its Private Investor Portfolio analytical product, which details the most popular Russian shares held in private portfolios.

The March report showed that portfolios of private investors included shares of Gazprom (23.6%), Sberbank ords (20.1%) and prefs (8%), Lukoil (9.8%), VTB Bank (7.3%), Surgutneftegas prefs (7%), Severstal (6.7%), Yandex (6.3%), Magnit (5.6%) and Norilsk Nickel (5.5%).