Nearly 40% of new stock investors are under 35 years old

The French Financial Markets Authority (AMF) has released data confirming the arrival of a new generation of stock market investors.

The transaction reports received by the AMF and Kantar’s annual study on direct stock ownership both point to the same finding: a record proportion of the youngest age group among individual shareholders. 

As early as the spring of 2020, in the midst of the health crisis, the AMF observed an influx of new, younger investors into the stock markets. The trend strengthened over the following months, although the influx of newcomers has since leveled off at around 50,000 per quarter. Over the course of four and a half years, from 2019 to 2023, nearly 1.5 million new investors made their first trades on the stock market. These data are derived from daily transaction reports submitted to the AMF by investment service providers, which have been mandatory since the 2018 entry into force of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II). These detailed transaction reports enable the AMF to track retail investors’ behavior in the stock market and to publish a quarterly dashboard on active retail investors since January 2021.
 

Thus, in the first half of 2023, of some 95,500 new individual stock investors, 38.5% were under 35—a record high—compared with just 12% for all of 2019 and 28% in 2020. The share of those under 25 alone reached an unprecedented 14.1% of these new investors—twice the level seen in 2020.
Among all retail investors conducting transactions—whether buying or selling—in stocks, the proportion of those under 35 rose to 17.4% at the end of June 2023, the highest level recorded by the AMF since it began collecting detailed data. Investors under 25, who accounted for only 1.4% of active investors in 2019, now number three times as many (4.1%). Thus, in the first half of 2023, more than 53,000 investors were under 25, compared with just under 13,000 in the first half of 2019.
 

The leading survey in this field—the SoFia study, conducted by Kantar since 2009—confirms this marked trend toward younger stock market investors. While the reported rate of direct stock ownership among the general population remains stable, at 6.8% in March 2023, a clear generational shift has taken place. People under 35 now account for nearly 20% of direct stockholders—a level never seen since the study began—and twice as high as in 2015. The share of those under 25 in the population of individual shareholders (excluding employer-provided shares) has more than tripled in eight years, reaching 11.2 percent, surpassing that of the 25–34 age group (8.1 percent). At the same time, the ownership rate has declined among those over 45, to 7.7 percent.
 

“This new generation of individual investors is an asset for the Paris stock market,” said AMF Chairwoman Marie-Anne Barbat-Layani. “The AMF will continue its educational efforts to help shareholders—especially new investors, regardless of their age—develop a long-term perspective on the stock market.”