Russia’s Moscow Exchange (MOEX) on Thursday revealed that nearly 1.2 million new individuals have opened an account on the Trading Platform this year. This shows that over 10 million retail investors have opened accounts with the exchange.
However, the total number of brokerage accounts with the exchange amounts to 16 million.
Similar to the rest of the world, Russia witnessed an influx of new traders last year as the economic impact of Coronavirus made the stock markets volatile. The Russian exchange was constantly reporting a higher number of new accounts being created throughout the year.
The impact of the 2020 market conditions was clear as MOEX onboarded around 5 million new traders last year alone. This number was higher than the previous client base of the exchange altogether.
The Lockdown Has Pushed the Growth of Retail Traders
In addition, the latest announcement detailed that Sberbank customers remained most active with 4.20 million accounts marginally followed by Tinkoff Bank’s 4.19 million accounts. Other banks like VTB, BCS and Alfa Bank had customers opening 1.23 million, 0.63 million, and 0.56 million accounts, respectively.
With the rising interest in trading in the new retail client base, the total number of accounts at MOEX has jumped tenfold over the previous six years.
The latest milestone was achieved by the exchange in less than a month when it onboarded 9 million individuals, Finance Magnates reported earlier.
Moreover, the Russian exchange detailed that its massive retail client base is mostly interested in trading equities with 42 percent of its total turnover coming from this space. The derivative market is popular, generating another 42 percent of its yearly turnover, while the bonds and FX markets are contributing 10.5 percent and 14 percent, respectively.
Furthermore, Moscow Exchange ended last year with a strong rebound in its FX volumes, which jumped 33 percent year-on-year in December with a volume of RUB 31.3 trillion ($424 billion).
