This week, the MICEX Stock Exchange has registered its 200 000th individual investor, served by Finam Investment Company. As was announced at today’s briefing, Alexander Fillipovich from Voronezh runs his small construction and trade business. Alexander Fillipovich received from the MICEX Stock Exchange and the broker company some presents which included a free trip to Maldives.
The rapid growth of the number of investors in the Russian stock market points to the growing popularity of investing in Russian issuers’ shares and corporate bonds. According to the MICEX SE CEO Alexei Rybnikov, today the number of individual investors registered on the MICEX Stock Exchange is 202 525, while the overall number of investors has reached 234 628.
The MICEX Stock Exchange has announced that the 1 000 000th investor registered on the Exchange will be awarded 1 million rubles in prize money.
Chairman of the MICEX SE Executive Board Alexander Potemkin said at the briefing that, considering the size of Russia’s economy and the country’s population, 200 thousand individual investors does not seem like a huge figure. This is about 0.6% of the total number of Russian households (about 30 million) and less than 4% of Russia’s middle class (about 5 million households). However, the rate of growth is quite impressive. One year ago, in October 2005, the number of individual investors in the MICEX Group’s stock market was about 95 thousand, while five years ago it was only about 20 thousand. Rosneft’s IPO showed the population’s growing interest in the stock market. 115 thousand individual investors bought shares in Rosneft. Although not all of these 115 thousand investors trade on the MICEX Stock Exchange, the success of the “people’s IPO” demonstrates that the Russian market can attract a large number of individual investors. “This is why in the nearest future we can expect accelerated growth of individual investments in Russia”, said the MICEX head.
The number of participants is growing as a result of the implementation of online access to trading in the MICEX Group’s markets. The MICEX pioneered in the use of web-based trading by offering thousands of Russian individual investors a cheap and practical method of working in the stock market. Seven years ago the MICEX launched its electronic bridge (gateway), which enabled retail investors to promptly enter buy and sell orders. During the first few months, the overall volume of trades made in the stock market via the Internet was only a few per cent. Today this figure never falls below 50%. In the share market the number of trades made via the Internet amounts to 70-80% of the total number of trades.