India is a young country, and that’s finally beginning to reflect in its equity markets.
As many as 40 percent of stock market investors in India are now below the age of 30. This number was just 22.9 percent in 2018. The median age of Indian investors has also fallen from 38 years in 2018 to 32 years in 2024.
The number of stock market investors under the age of 30 has spiked after the coronavirus pandemic. In March 2018, the number was 22.9, which fell slightly to 22.6 percent in 2019. It rose marginally to 23.5 percent by March 2020, around the time the covid pandemic had hit. But after the pandemic, the number began to rise rapidly — it rose to 29.4 percent in 2021 and 37.5 percent in 2022 during the covid bull market. Since then, the pace of growth has steadied again, rising to 38.5 percent in 2023 and now 40 percent in 2024.
The rise in young investors has coincided with a rise in stock market investors in India — in 2020, the total number of demat accounts in India was 4.1 crore, which has risen to 17.1 crore in 2024. It would appear that most of these new investors were young, which have caused their percentages to rise in the overall mix of investors.
And there have been a host of factors that have contributed to this increase. The pandemic confined people to their homes, and with few ways to spend money, many people took to stock market investing. It helped that the stock market boomed during that period, which got even more people into the markets. The period also coincided with the rise of online finfluencers, who’ve been encouraging Indians to invest in the stock markets, and move away from traditional investments like real estate and bank FDs. And with the percentage of Indians investing in the stock markets nearly doubling in the last 5 years, strong domestic inflows into the Indian equity markets might continue for several more years to come.