Retail now a big investor pie, but their weight is still small

Individuals investing up to ₹10,000 a month make up a third of all investors, show NSE data

- Ram Sahgal

Individuals who invested up to ₹10,000 in the stock market made up a third of the entire investing community, including institutional and non-institutional, November data from National Stock Exchange (NSE) showed, even as their contribution to the turnover remained fractional.

The data, considering so-called active investors who invested at least once a month, shows how an increasing number of small investors has been crowding the market bandwagon and investing part of their investible surplus in stocks in the past few years since the pandemic years of 2020-21 and 2021-22.

Understandably, the value of trades of those investing less than ₹10,000 totalled ₹530 crore, or just 0.04% of the share of total turnover of ₹14.82 trillion, accounted for by all investors—institutional, proprietary, retail, high-net-worth individuals (HNIs) and corporate, NSE data showed.

A total of 10.7 million investors were active on the country’s largest exchange, accounting for 93% share of the capital markets segment turnover, with BSE a distant second.