MANILA – Millennials and online investors pushed the number of stock market accounts in the Philippines past the 1 million mark in 2018, a 25 percent increase from a year earlier.
This was driven by a 61 percent surge in online investors or 626,000 accounts out of the almost 1.1 million total in 2018, Philippine Stock Exchange said in a statement. Investors 18 to 29 years old comprised more than a fifth of total retail investors last year, up from 16 percent in 2017. The share of female investors also rose to 48 percent from 45 percent.
“Investors nowadays are younger and a significant number of them are women,” PSE President Ramon Monzon said. “The advent of online trading has proven to be the catalyst for rapid growth of stock market investors in the last five years.”
Retail investors owned 98 percent of Philippine stock market accounts in 2018, with 62 percent of them earning less than half a million pesos ($9,582) a year, while 21 percent made 500,000 pesos to 1 million pesos.
Domestic investors held 98 percent of stock market accounts. By nationality, the top foreign investors were Chinese (24 percent), American (16 percent) and Japanese (10 percent). (Bloomberg)
