Young investors aged 20 to 30 made up 33 percent of the 1.48 million new investors who opened local stock trading accounts last year, ranking first among all age groups, the Financial Supervisory Commission said yesterday.
They were followed by those aged 31 to 40, who accounted for 26.6 percent, 41 to 50 (16.7 percent), 51 to 60 (10.8 percent), 61 or older (6.7 percent) and those younger than 20 (6.1 percent), the commission said.
The number of investors who opened new trading accounts last year surged 73.6 percent from 857,657 in 2019, easily outpacing an annual gain of 28 percent the previous year, the commission said.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
Investors aged 20 to 30 had for the past three years led the surge, with their weighting rising from 27.7 percent in 2018 and 29.1 percent in 2019, data from the commission showed.
“Their weighting was particularly high last year,” Securities and Futures Bureau Deputy Director-General Tsai Li-ling (蔡麗玲) told a news conference in New Taipei City.
Young investors’ rising interest in local stocks could be attributed to an increase in investors’ preference for equities over savings due to a low interest rate environment and the launch of an odd-lot trading system in late October, which enabled young players with smaller budgets to buy blue-chip stocks, the commission said.
Blue-chip stocks refer to financially sound, well-recognized companies, some of whose shares cost hundreds of thousands New Taiwan dollars if bought on the regular trading platform, where they are sold in units of 1,000 shares each.
For example, purchasing one unit of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) shares would cost NT$632,000, based on its closing price of NT$950 on Friday last week.
Overall, investors aged 40 or younger accounted for 65.7 percent of the new accounts, up from 60.9 percent a year earlier and 60 percent in 2018, the data showed.
By comparison, the weighting of investors older than 40 dropped to 34.3 percent last year, from 40 percent in 2018 and 39.1 percent in 2019, as the older group likely already had a few accounts in use, it said.
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