Almost 30% of investors come to the market for excitement and self-realization

29% of Russian retail investors come to the market for the sake of excitement and self-realization. This follows from the study of FrankRG “Retail investments in Russia 2026 – in search of reasonable boundaries of technology” (there is RBC Investments).

According to the survey, the share of retail investors in the Russian stock market is 98%. The remaining 2% are professional investors. In their activities, retail investors pursue the following goals (possibly several answers):

save capital (67% of respondents), increase capital (60%), form savings for long-term goals (46%), get excitement and self-realization from investing (29%).

For some investors, goals can be clearly expressed, while for others - overlap, the authors of the study note.

They note that Russians are more likely to consider longer investment terms. The share of those whose investment horizon is more than 10 years increased from 13.5% to 18.1% (+4.6%). The share of investors with an investment horizon of 5 to 10 years also grew from 11.9% in 2025 to 13.8% in 2026. Investing for a period of 3-5 years is considered by 25.6% of respondents against 24.7% a year earlier. At the same time, the share of those who are ready to invest less than one year fell the most, to 8.6% against 13.2% a year earlier.

One of the representatives of the life insurance market believes that the willingness of investors to invest in longer-term products is explained by the desire to fix high rates on a long horizon with continuing expectations for easing monetary policy.

Meanwhile, less than half of investors are guided by analytical materials of professional market participants. 58% of respondents said they did not study analytics from a broker. Among such investors, 25% study analytics from other sources. 20% consider brokerage analytics to be superficial and do not help decision-making. 17% noted that the analysis of investment companies is difficult. The same percentage of investors do not trust broker analytics. Another 9 percent don’t know their broker has analytic content.

In the summer, the Bank of Russia published a study in which it analyzed how much private investors managed to earn between 2023 and 2025. It turned out that the average annual return of client portfolios on brokerage services for this period was 2.9%. Almost two-thirds of customers (63%) received a positive result, but for the majority of them (41%), the yield did not exceed 6.7% per annum, which is lower than the indicators of the full yield of government bonds of the Moscow Exchange (RGBITR).

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