(BFM Bourse) – In 2023, individual investors were less present on the financial markets, according to the latest AMF barometer. They were 13% less than in 2022, a year nevertheless considered complicated on the markets.
The French were less seduced by the stock market in 2023, despite a very good vintage for the CAC 40 which gained 16.52% in 2023. This is what reveals the thirteenth edition of the Dashboard of active individual investors of the Financial Markets Authority (AMF).
Since January 2021, the AMF has published every three months a dashboard of individual investors active on the financial markets during the previous quarter. It makes it possible to monitor changes in the behavior of individual investors. For this barometer, the AMF looks back at the fourth quarter as well as the whole of 2023.
Last year, 1.308 million French people carried out at least one transaction (whether sale or purchase) on stocks. This is 13% less than in 2022 (1.508 million) and even 18% less compared to the peak of 2021 (1.597 million). Cumulatively, over the period 2018-2023, however, nearly 3.7 million French people have carried out at least one transaction on the stock markets.
Overall, the number of transactions carried out in 2023, all financial products combined (index funds, shares, bonds, certificates and warrants) fell by 11% year-on-year, to 37.7 million. That’s still 28.8 transactions on average per year for active investors.
The passive investment boom
On the other hand, if we narrow the magnifying glass over the last three months of 2023, the trend is slightly different. With the rebound of the markets at the end of the year, “small holders” were a little more tempted to take action. Between October and December, 512,000 investors purchased shares, a number which increased by 1.5% over a quarter. A level which had not been observed since the second quarter of 2023 (516,000).
The number of new individual investors, who had never placed a stock market order before or had been inactive since January 2018, increased over one year to stand at 43,000, compared to 37,000 at the end of 2022. This number is nevertheless almost stable over a rolling quarter (42,000 in the third quarter of 2023).
As for the number of transactions carried out for the purchase and sale of listed shares of the European Union during the quarter, this rebounded slightly compared to the two previous quarters, to more than 8.78 million operations.
The other notable fact of this barometer is the strong attraction of investors for exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The number of investors who bet on an ETF over the last three months of 2023 amounted to 166,000. Over the whole of 2023, there are even 300,000 individual investors who have been attracted by these passive management products. And this is also a record.
Sabrina Sadgui – ©2024 BFM Bourse
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