1.8 million retail investors opened accounts with Moscow Exchange (MOEX) in the seven months through July 2020, ploughing more than $16 billion into shares during a volatile month’s trading.
That brings the total number of retail brokerage account at Russia’s largest trading venue up to 5.65 million. The exchange added an average of 257,000 individual accounts each month during the January-July period compared with a monthly average increase of 159,000 in the same interval of 2019.
Money may be invested into MOEX’s securities market instruments, such as forex, shares, government and corporate bonds, as well as ETFs and mutual funds.
According to the MOEX’s monthly report, private investors who made at least one trade in July came to a record 821,500, well above the 2019 monthly average of 244,900. They have pumped RUB 1.2 trillion worth into shares during July.
Moex also noted that local investors poured billions of roubles into exchange-traded funds with a record 3 million trades in ETFs were executed for a total of RUB 22.6 billion in July. Like most investment funds, Russian ETFs are a basket of securities like stocks, bonds and commodities which all can be traded in a single transaction.
The exchange, however, didn’t explain why there had been a jump in retail activity throughout 2020. But amid concerns over the economic impact from the coronavirus outbreak, there was a brighter side for all trading platforms, which attracted a rush of business as investors scrambled to protect portfolios.
Since 2015, Moex allowed private investors either to open an IIA with a broker (brokerage account) or asset management company (through trust management). The latest metrics show that the number of Individual Investment Accounts (IIA) accounts exceeded 2.5 million with 887,000 accounts have been opened year to date compared to 1.05 million accounts opened during the entirety of 2019.
MOEX, in particular, continues to as part of a state-backed drive to make Russia’s largest institutional trading venue one of the world’s leading financial hubs. Most recently, the exchange acquired a minority stake in , which owns proprietary OTC FX platform NTPro.
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