(News Bulletin 247) – Between April and June, the number of individual investors active on the financial markets has never been so high in two years, according to the latest AMF barometer, which confirms the strong attraction of passive management among investors.

After having slightly deserted the financial markets at the start of the year, individual investors have regained a taste for the stock market with the return of fine weather and a CAC 40 which reached an absolute peak of 8,259.19 points on 10 May.

“Small investors” were therefore more tempted to take action. The number of private investors active on the stock market in the second quarter was the highest in the last two years, reveals the fifteenth edition of the Dashboard of active private investors of the Financial Markets Authority (AMF).

Since January 2021, the AMF has published a dashboard of individual investors active on the financial markets during the previous quarter every three months. It allows us to monitor changes in the behavior of individual investors.

800,000 active individuals

Between April and the end of June, 800,000 individuals made at least one purchase or sale of shares, a jump of 21% compared to the second quarter of 2023. The AMF then recorded 661,000 individuals who made at least one purchase or sale of shares.

In detail, nearly 600,000 investors bought shares between April and the end of June, a number which rose by 15.7% over a year, and which increased by 5.1% compared to the previous quarter (568,000).

The number of new retail investors, who had never previously placed a stock market order or had been inactive since January 2018, increased over the year to 56,000, compared to 45,000 in the second quarter of 2023.

A craze that remains intact

As has been the case for several quarters now, the AMF has noted a strong attraction among investors for exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Between April and the end of June 2024, the number of investors who bought or sold at least one ETF increased to 248,000, a record since the creation of this dashboard. This contingent of active investors in ETFs has thus more than doubled over a year and climbed by 15% over a rolling quarter.

Also, the number of people who bought an ETF increased to 227,000, a figure significantly “higher than in previous quarters”, notes the AMF, which specifies that among these buyers, 56,000 people invested for the first time in these passive management products.

“The number of transactions for ETFs continued to increase, reaching 1.2 million in the second quarter,” adds the financial markets regulator. For the second consecutive quarter, transactions on this type of product have therefore exceeded the symbolic million mark.

As for the number of transactions carried out for the purchase and sale of European Union shares during the second quarter, this stood at 10.3 million, in line with the first quarter of 2024.