More Filipinos started participating in the stock market as the coronavirus pandemic forced people to work from home, latest data from the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) showed.

The average daily number of trades in 2020 jumped by 33.7%, while retail participation surged by 47.8%.

Online accounts increased by 19.7% to 936,000, while non-online accounts went up by 3.3% to 460,553. This means that 67% of the total stock market accounts are online accounts.

“The preference for opening online accounts continues to rise since technology has made investing more accessible to investors,” said PSE president and chief executive officer Ramon Monzon.

The rise in stock market activity came as lockdowns wiped out over P1 trillion worth of market value in 2020, triggering several circuit breakers.

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Total stock market accounts grew 13.7% in 2020 to almost 1.4 million from 1.2 million in 2019.

Retail investors held nearly all of the accounts at almost 1.4 million or 97.9% of total stock market accounts, while institutional investors owned 2.1% or 29,898 accounts.

Local investors made up 1.4 million or 98.5% of total stock market accounts compared with 21,233 accounts of foreign investors.

By age group, investors 30 to 44 years old held 45.6% of stock market accounts. They are followed by investors aged 18 to 29 at 22.5%, then those in the age groups of 45 to 59 as well as 60 and above at 19.8% and 12.1%, respectively.

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Retail investors earning less than P500,000 annually made up 61.2% of stock market account holders, while 21.6% of retail accounts were owned by those with an annual income of P500,000 to P1 million.

Investors whose annual income is above P1 million comprised 17.2% of retail investors.

Domestic investors were largely based in Metro Manila at 75.7%, followed by Luzon at 13.5% then the Visayas at 5.7%, while Mindanao comprised only 3.4%.

The top five nationalities of foreign investors were Chinese, Japanese, American, British, and Korean. – Rappler.com