(News Bulletin 247) – The market rebound has somewhat reconciled the French with the stock market. The number of retail investors active in the financial markets rose again in the first quarter, according to the latest AMF barometer.

The French have regained a little taste for the stock market after turning their backs on it slightly in 2022 in a very chaotic financial context.

The number of retail investors active on the stock market in the first quarter thus rose again, in a context of a sharp upturn in the equity markets, reveals the tenth edition of the Dashboard of active retail investors from the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF). ).

Since January 2021, the AMF has published a scoreboard of retail investors active on the financial markets during the previous quarter every three months. It makes it possible to monitor changes in the behavior of individual investors.

During the first three months of the year, 746,000 individuals therefore made at least one purchase or sale of shares. This is 24% more than in the two previous quarters (600,000). However, this level remains lower than those recorded in the first quarters of 2020, 2021 and 2022, underlines the AMF. But it is still higher than the number of active investors in 2018 and 2019, i.e. before the health crisis.

A “significant” rebound in transactions

With the rebound of the markets, the “small carriers” were more tempted to take action. Between January and March, 566,000 investors bought shares, a number which increased by 27% over a quarter. A level that had not been observed since the second quarter of 2022 (564,000).

The number of sellers increased significantly “after a wait-and-see phase observed in the second half of last year”, to 513,000. This number is even lower than the number of buyers – as a reminder 566,000 – which shows a positive buyer-seller balance. The recovery of the equity markets since the beginning of the year has certainly encouraged neophytes to launch (or relaunch) the stock market.

The number of new individual investors, who had never placed a stock market order before or had been inactive since January 2018, has also increased to 51,000, compared to 37,300 at the end of 2022.

As for the number of transactions carried out for the purchase and sale of equities during the quarter, it rebounded significantly compared to the two previous quarters, to more than 11.9 million, which represents almost double the quarterly average observed in 2018 and 2019.

The other notable feature of this barometer is the strong investor appeal of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The number of investors betting on an ETF in the first quarter rose to 159,000, the highest level for five years.