More than 7.5 mln retail investors held brokerage accounts as of the end of October
At the end of October, the number of individuals with a brokerage account on Moscow Exchange exceeded 7.5 mln. October posted a monthly record with more than 736,000 people opening brokerage accounts; 3.6 mln people have opened brokerage accounts year-to-date.
In October, the highest ever number of retail investors – more than 1.2 mln – traded on MOEX.
MOEX’s average daily trading volume in equities was RUB 78.2 bln (USD 1 bln).
Retail investors accounted for 43% (34% in 2019) of equity trading, 16% (10% on average in 2019) of the central order book for bonds, 12.3% of FX spot trading and 44% of derivatives trading.
The net asset value (NAV) of the ETFs exceeded RUB 100.6 bln (USD 1.3 bln). MOEX recently introduced two new Russian-law ETFs, bringing the total number of ETFs to 49 (15 ETFs and 34 Russian-law ETFs, of which two ETFs and 15 Russian-law ETFs have been added this year).
Individuals have invested RUB 50 bln (USD 688 mln) in ETFs year to date, a threefold increase on the entire 2019, when ETF investments were RUB 17 bln.
The number of Individual Investment Accounts (IIA) opened with Moscow Exchange as of the end of October exceeded 3.1 million. 1.5 mln accounts have been opened year-to-date.
In January-September 2020, trading volume of IIAs exceeded RUB 1.1 trln; equities accounted for 86.2% of total trading volume, bonds accounted for 10% and ETFs accounted for 3.6%.
Of IIAs, brokerage accounts represent 94.8% of the total, and trust management accounts represent the remaining 5.2%.
Among banks, Sberbank has opened the most IIAs for its customers (1.6 mln IIAs), followed by Tinkoff Bank (508,900) and VTB Bank (472,600). The leading brokerage firms in terms of IIAs opened are BCS (150,100), Otkritie Broker (above 100,400) and Finam (70,500) and the leading asset managers are Sberbank Asset Management (204,100 IIAs), Alfa Capital (38,200) and Region Group (32,900).
The top regions by number of IIAs are Moscow (338,700 IIAs), the Moscow region (186,400) and St. Petersburg (140,000). Leaders in other regions are Sverdlovsk region (103,400), Bashkortostan (100,000) and Krasnodar krai (86,900).
According to MOEX’s monthly Individual Investment Indicator analytical report, retail investors traded a record RUB 73.3 bln worth of Russian shares on MOEX in October and RUB 422.9 bln year to date (calculated as the difference between the total buying and selling volumes traded by individual clients).
The October report showed that portfolios of private investors [1] included Sberbank ords (22.3%) and prefs (8.7%), Gazprom (21.3%), Lukoil (12.1%), Norilsk Nickel (11%), VTB Bank (5.3%), Aeroflot (5.1%), Yandex (5.1%), Surgutneftegas prefs (4.8%) and MTS (4.3%).
Foreign shares in those portfolios were Apple (21.2%), Boeing (16.2%), Intel (14.2%), Amazon (8.7%), AT&T (7.6%), Microsoft (7.1%), NVIDIA (6.9%), AMD Inc. 6.9%), Facebook (5.9%) and Netflix (5.2%).
At the end of October, the top ten ETFs were iFXIT ETF on US IT shares (22.8%), Fin EX Gold ETF (FXGD) (14.6%), FXUS ETF on US shares (14.1%), TRUR ETF on equities, bonds, money and gold (11.3%), FXCN ETF on Chinese stocks (9.4%), FXMM ETF on the money market (6.5%), FXRL ETF on the RTS Index (6%), and FXRU ETF on Russian corporate USD-denominated Eurobonds (5.8%), SBMX ETF on the MOEX Russia Index (5.4%) and FXDE ETF on German shares (4.2%).