India’s Largest Stock Exchange, NSE, Surpasses 50 Million Unique Investor Mark

The National Stock Exchange (NSE) said that it has surpassed five crore unique investors on October 25.

According to the exchange, the transition from three crore to four crore investors took 15 months, while the transition from four crore unique investors to five crore took seven months.

The total dematerialised accounts stand at seven crore currently, as one investor can hold multiple demat accounts with a single Permanent Account Number (PAN).

Dematerialised accounts are held with the Central Depository Services Limited and the National Securities Depository Limited.

In the journey from four crore to five crore investors, Northern and Western India have contributed to the rapid rise in investor participation in the stock markets, accounting for 36 and 31 per cent of new investors respectively.

On the other hand, Southern and Eastern India contributed to 20 and 13 per cent respectively.

State wise, Maharashtra is leading with 17 per cent of the new investors, followed by Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, which contributed 10 and 7 per cent respectively.

In another positive development, the areas beyond the top 50 cities accounted for 57 per cent of the new investor additions. In addition, the areas beyond the top 100 cities contributed to 43 per cent of new investors.

Evidently, awareness about stock investing has grown beyond a few urban areas and cities.

The Indian stock markets have been performing extremely well, with the Index breaching the 60,000 mark in September 2021, after falling below 30,000 in March 2020.

The high returns offered by the stock markets, in an era of abnormally low interest rates, has pushed both institutional and retail money into stocks. The ease of trading, facilitated by digital brokerages along with low-to-zero fees, has certainly played a major role in popularising stock investing.

According to the Futures Industry Association, NSE is the largest derivative trading platform in terms of volumes of contracts traded for the calendar year 2020.

In addition, according to the World Federation of Exchanges, NSE is ranked fourth in the world in terms of numbers of trades in the equity cash markets.

NSE also highlighted the fact that India’s capital markets have evolved to offer several products to investors beyond stocks — including mutual funds, exchange traded funds, bonds, real-estate investment trusts (REITs), infrastructure investment trusts (Invits), among others.

Therefore, the five crore unique investors might not be purely equity investors.

“NSE today offers a host of financial products addressing the different needs and risk appetites of the investors. The investors can diversify their portfolio on the exchange platform by investing in equity shares or via the exchange traded fund/mutual fund route, government securities through non-competitive bidding platform, secondary market or via the exchange traded funds, corporate bonds, real estate or infrastructure projects by way of investments in REITs and InvITs, in gold through Gold ETFs or Sovereign Gold bonds, etc,” said Vikram Limaye, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of NSE.