New Delhi, Sep 6: Women participation in equity markets has surged during the COVID-19 pandemic and experts believe the growing need to share household expenses with rampant pay cuts and lay-offs has brought them to trading, market participants said.
Women are looking for alternatives to the decreasing bank's Fixed Deposit (FD) rates, they added.
"As retail participation has grown during the lockdown, this has been true for women as well. In line with the overall investors' population, women are looking for alternatives to decreasing FD rates," said Shankar Vailaya - Director, Sharekhan by BNP Paribas. Lockdown has just been an accelerator allowing women to deepen their capital market knowledge via digital solutions, he added.
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Online brokerage house Upstox said it has witnessed a growth of 32 per cent in account opening by women from April to June 2020, compared to the preceding three months. Of these, 70 per cent of women are first-time investors. Additionally, more than 35 per cent of the brokerage house's women customers are housewives.
Ravi Kumar, co-founder, and CEO, Upstox said, "the increased need for sharing household expenses with rampant pay cuts and lay-offs is what seems to have brought more women into trading".
"Also, factors like rising gold prices and low returns on bank's fixed deposits and real-estate investments have driven the growing trend of moving savings from physical to financial assets," he said.
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According to Upstox, around 74 per cent of female customers are from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities like Visakhapatnam, Jaipur, Surat, Ranga Reddy, Nagpur, Nashik, Guntur, among others.
Out of the overall number of active female customers, 55 per cent are traders, whereas 45 per cent are investors (those that invest in equity delivery).
It has seen a jump in active female customers by 53 per cent from April to June 2020, as compared to the preceding three months.
Tejas Khoday, co-founder and CEO, of FYERS, said in the last four months the stockbroking fintech startup acquired over 20,000 new customers, of which 10 per cent were women traders.
Prakarsh Gagdani, CEO, 5paisa.com said women investors have started actively managing their money and are quite successful at it. Earlier, most of them would avoid stocks but now with simple technology and access to knowledge about markets, they are at the tipping point.
