Retail investors opened 2.5 million Individual Investment Accounts with MOEX
At the end of July, the number of individuals with a brokerage account on Moscow Exchange reached 5.65 million. 298,700 people opened brokerage accounts in July and 1.8 mln people have opened brokerage accounts year-to-date.
A record 821,500 retail investors executed at least one trade in July. They traded a total of RUB 1.2 trln worth of equities.
ETFs are becoming more popular among clients on MOEX: in July, a record 3 million trades in ETFs and Russian-law ETFs were executed for a total of RUB 22.6 bln. Net asset value (NAV) of the ETFs exceeded USD 1 bln (RUB 76.2 bln). In 2020, MOEX has introduced two new ETFs and seven new Russian-law ETFs, bringing the total number of ETFs to 41 (15 ETFs and 26 Russian-law ETFs).
The number of Individual Investment Accounts (IIA) opened with Moscow Exchange as of the end of July exceeded 2.5 million. 887,000 accounts have been opened year to date compared 1.05 million accounts opened during the entirety of 2019. As previously disclosed, the two-millionth IIA was registered on MOEX in March 2020.
In January-July 2020, trading volume of IIAs totaled RUB 812 bln; equities accounted for 87% of total trading volume, bonds accounted for 10% and ETFs accounted for 3%.
Of IIAs, brokerage accounts represent 89% of the total, and trust management accounts represent the remaining 11%.
Among banks, Sberbank has opened the most IIAs for its customers (1.2 mln IIAs), followed by VTB Bank (415,600) and Tinkoff Bank (413,900). The leading brokerage firms in terms of IIAs opened are BCS (129,400), Otkritie Broker (96,300) and Finam (68,900) and the leading asset managers are Sberbank Asset Management (175,900 IIAs), Otkritie (30,600) and Region Group (28,400).
The top regions by number of IIAs are Moscow (286,800 IIAs), the Moscow region (158,400) and St. Petersburg (114,600). Other regions account for 78% of IIAs, with Sverdlovsk region (84,200), Bashkortostan (80,700) and Krasnodar krai (71,040) leading the list.
According to MOEX’s monthly Individual Investment Indicator analytical report, retail investors traded a total of RUB 9.8 bln worth of Russian shares on MOEX in July and RUB 230.3 bln year to date (calculated as the difference between the total buying and selling volumes traded by individual clients).
The July report showed that portfolios of private investors included shares of Gazprom (24.5%), Norilsk Nickel (13.8%), Sberbank ords (13.6%) and prefs (8.2%), Lukoil (12.2%), VTB Bank (6.8%), Surgutneftegas prefs (5.6%), Aeroflot (5.4%), MTS (5.1%) and Severstal (4.8%). To compile the report, the Exchange uses anonymized aggregate data on retail investors’ open interest in the most liquid stocks traded on MOEX.
At the end of July, the top ten ETFs were iFXIT ETF on US IT shares (20.4%), Fin EX Gold ETF (FXGD) (19.3%), FXUS ETF on US shares (13.2%), TRUR ETF on equities, bonds, money and gold (9.4%), FXRL ETF on the RTS Index (7,7%), FXCN ETF on Chinese stocks (7.2%), FXMM ETF on the money market (6.7%) and FXRU ETF on Russian corporate USD-denominated Eurobonds (6.1%), SBMX ETF on the MOEX Russia Index (5.8%) and FXTB ETF on U.S. treasury bonds (4.9%).