Retail Investor Statistics - August Sees Revival of Inflows

Moscow Exchange has published the August numbers on retail brokerage accounts. Inflows accelerated to R40 bln ($286 mln), from R12 bln in July. > More than 500,000 new brokerage accounts were opened in the month, the highest on record. The overall number of unique retail clients exceeded 6 mln. > Local mutual funds saw inflow of R19 bln ($270 mln), although most of that, as was the case in July, went into FI funds. We estimate the inflow into the equity market at $100 mln.> Data on the portfolio structure of retail investors reveals interesting trends. In previous months, retail investors had primarily been accumulating Nornickel stock while reducing their exposure to Sberbank. In August, however, they increased allocations to Sberbank, the weight of Sberbank commons in their portfolio expanding by 4.4 pp and that of the prefs by 1.0 pp. It seems that retail investors have been absorbing an increased supply of these stocks from institutional investors, who were rotating away from Russian banks amid concerns over geopolitical developments. > Another interesting point is the return of Yandex to the top 10 stocks held by retail investors. It had dropped out of top 10 back in June as foreign institutional investors were accumulating the stock ahead of its MSCI inclusion. The fact that retail investors returned as buyers of Yandex in August was quite surprising. This also helps explain the stock's recent stellar performance - there were simply no sellers around the index rebalancing date.