Recently, several surveys have found that when it comes to the stock market women do more research, are better at matching their investments to their goals, trade less and remain calmer during market fluctuations.
During the last two years, the Saudi stock market recorded the entry of about 381,000 new female investors, with 37,000 in last year, and 244,000 in 2019. This brings the number of women investors’ portfolios to 1.4 million by last December, compared to 1.3 million in 2019 and about one million by the end of 2018.
According to the Capital Market Authority, Saudi Arabia’s financial regulatory body, the number of individuals investing in the stock market reached a record level of 5.6 million by the end of 2020 and this includes 1.4 million women which is about a quarter of total investors (24.8 percent).
When evaluating on a quarterly basis, the number of women who have investment portfolios in the stock market increased by 14,000 in Q4 2020. The number of individual investors in the Saudi stock market surged to about 5.5 million in Q2 2020 compared to 4.7 million in the same quarter of 2019, an increase of 17 percent.
The rise in the number of investors came after an increment in female investors to 1.7 million, an increase of about 64 percent compared to the same quarter of 2019. The number of male investors jumped to 4.2 million in Q2 2020 compared to 3.7 million during the same quarter of 2019, an increase of 12 percent.
On the other hand, the number of males in the Saudi stock market increased to 4.2 million, an increase of 73,000 investors, compared to the previous year, where their number was 4.124 million, and their number increased by about 27,000 investors compared to the Q3 2020, which was 4.17 million.
In the past 4 years, the number of female investor portfolios grew from 989,708 women in 2017 to about 1,008,054 in the following year, up to 1,352,000 by the end of 2019 and then 1,389,000 female investors in 2020, a growth rate of 2.7 percent over 2019.
