5 million retail investors now trading on MOEX

The number of individuals with a brokerage account on Moscow Exchange reached 5 million, up by one million year to date.

In January-April 2020, an average of 258,000 individual accounts were opened every month, compared to 159,000 accounts in the same period in 2019.

597,000 retail investors executed at least one trade in April.

The number of Individual Investment Accounts (IIA) opened with Moscow Exchange exceeded 2.2 million. 583,000 accounts have been opened year to date. Brokerage accounts account for 88% of the total, and trust management accounts represent the remaining 12%.

According to MOEX’s monthly Individual Investment Indicator analytical report, retail investors traded a total of RUB 34.6 bln worth of Russian shares on MOEX in April (calculated as the difference between the total buying and selling volumes traded by individual clients).

The April report showed that portfolios of private investors included shares of Gazprom (23.5%), Sberbank ords (19.1%) and prefs (9.3%), Lukoil (11.5%), VTB Bank (7.5%), Rosneft (6.3%), Norilsk Nickel (5.9%), Severstal (5.7%), Yandex (5.7%) and Surgutneftegas prefs (5.4%).

At the end of April, the most popular ETFs were FinEX Gold ETF (FXGD) (19.9%), iFXIT ETF on US IT shares (17.8%), FXUS ETF on US shares (12.9%), FXRL ETF on the RTS Index (9.6%), FXMM ETF on the money market (7.6%) and SBMX ETF on the MOEX Russia Index (7.3%).