The MICEX Stock Exchange trading system has registered its 250 000th individual investor. He is a client of Sberbank, one of participants in trading on the MICEX SE. At present, the number of individual investors is 252 198 people, while the total number of investors registered on the MICEX Stock Exchange has reached 287 694 clients.
The rapid growth of the number of investors on the Russian stock market reflects the increasing popularity of investing in stocks and corporate bonds of Russian issuers. According to Alexei Rybnikov, CEO of the MICEX Stock Exchange, “last year was marked by an explosive growth of liquidity of the exchange-based market for corporate securities.” In 2006, the total volume of trades in non-government securities on the MICEX Stock Exchange grew 3.2 times over 2005 and reached 20.38 trillion rubles (754.9 billion dollars). Correspondingly, the average daily volume of transactions in stock assets reached 82.5 billion rubles (3.1 billion dollars) a day. Transactions made by individual investors account for about 1/3 of the average daily volume of transactions on the MICEX SE.
Growth of the number of participants in trading came as result of the implementation of online access to trading on the MICEX markets. The MICEX pioneered in the use of online trading on its markets, having offered hundreds of thousands of Russian individual investors an inexpensive and practical way of working on the stock market.
The MICEX Stock Exchange is Russia’s leading stock market, where daily trading is held in shares and corporate bonds of about 600 Russian issuers. Their composite capitalization is almost 24 trillion rubles. The number of participants in trading on the MICEX SE is about 550 organizations – professional participants in the securities market. Their clients are over 280 thousand investors. In 2006, the total volume of trading on the MICEX Stock Exchange reached 20.38 trillion rubles (754.9 billion dollars), which is over 90% of the composite turnover of leading floors on the Russian stock market.
