Russian Investor Statistics - Record Inflows in April

Moscow Exchange has published retail investor statistics for April. Individual investors bought R77 bln ($1 bln) worth of Russian stocks, the largest amount on record. Local mutual funds also enjoyed decent inflows. In total, R30 bln was brought into mutual funds, of which R16 bln ($200 mln) went into Russian stocks. So in total local investors bought $1.2 bln worth of stocks. On the sellers' side, corporates sold $700 mln in one IPO and one ABB. This means that foreign investors sold $500 mln worth of Russian stocks. This rotation was most likely driven by geopolitical developments, including sanction news and the conflict in Ukraine returning to headlines. These tensions have eased, so we may expect foreign money to come back in May. The number of brokerage accounts continued to grow fast and reached 11.7 mln (+623,000 over the month).On the stock level, statistics suggest that retail investors were selling Nornickel and buying Sber and Lukoil. In the portfolio of the 10 largest stocks, the weight of Nornickel fell 2.4 pp, while the weight of Sber commons and prefs went up by 3.0 pp and 0.9 pp, respectively. Lukoil's weight was up 1 pp.