PSE passes 2 million trading accounts

The PSE [link] provided an accounts update and revealed that as of the end of 2024, there were 2.86 million stock market accounts in the PSE, up 50% from 2023’s 1.91 million. The exchange noted that the biggest growth was in the “online” segment, which increased 62% from 1.53 million to 2.47 million. PSE President Ramon Monzon attributed the growth to allowing “digital platforms to connect to the PSE’s trading engine.” According to the press release, 98.9% of trading accounts were held by retail investors, with institutional investors taking up the remaining 1.1%. In terms of local versus foreign, the PSE said that 99% of accounts were held by local traders, with only 1% being held by foreigners. Other statistics of interest: P50,746.82 is the average value of an online trade; P99823.86 is the average value of an “offline” trade; female traders are the slight majority in both total accounts and online accounts; 82.4% of online traders make less than P500K/year.

MB bottom-line: Credit where credit is due, this is the kind of structural reform that the PSE badly needed, and it’s worthy of recognition. The PSE took lessons from the COVID-era mania for crypto and meme stocks and realized that it could do more to bring the average retail investor into the arena. Mission accomplished? It’s hard to say from here. I think the PSE probably has the data to show how effective the interconnection of digital wallets like GCash and Maya has been. We know online accounts are up 62% and that the average online trade value is up 8%, but how many of those new accounts are viably funded and active? How does 2024’s total online transaction value compare to 2023’s? As noted by the PSE, the passage of the Capital Markets Efficiency Promotion Act will reduce trading commissions, and that should (all else equal) increase retail transactions for this year, but we really need the PSE to start publishing the exchange’s version of the ARPU metric used in telco analysis. There, we divide the total revenue by the number of users to come up with an “Average Revenue Per User” stat. Here, I’d love it if the PSE could do something similar, except with an angle to track the total retail transaction value by the number of accounts, like “Average Value Per User” (AVPU). It doesn’t sound pretty, but it would be very informative.    

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