Individual investors opened more than 10 million new brokerage accounts in 2020, JMP Securities estimates, a record. Individual investors piled into those stocks while snatching up shares of smaller companies, too. On peak trading days in 2020, individual traders are estimated to have accounted for nearly 25% of U.S. trading activity, Citadel Securities estimates. Despite the attention on the riskier trades that investors executed, studies have found individual investors performed well in 2020. Other analyses from researchers similarly found that individual investors didn’t significantly panic when markets tumbled this year, which rewarded them when markets began rising.

Source: Mint December 31, 2020 06:45 UTC