2 hours ago
1
Retail participation in the Nigerian stock market has grown 138.76% year-on-year, driven by a new generation of investors using mobile apps to access the market and grow their wealth.
Domestic retail investors traded ₦2.86 trillion ($2.07 billion) worth of equities between January and May 2026, according to Nigerian Exchange (NGX) data made available to TechCabal. The figure means retail investors now account for 36.22% of all trading activity on the exchange.
Over the 151 days between January and May, retail investors traded an average of ₦18.94 billion ($13.72 million) in stocks daily, according to NGX data.
The Retail Wave Calculator
Retail trading is up 138% this year. See how your trades fuel the ₦18.9B daily boom.
It takes 11,364,000 people trading like you to hit the NGX’s ₦18.94B daily retail average.
That is roughly 56.8% of the entire population of Lagos!
For decades, Nigeria’s stock market was dominated by pension funds, asset managers, and wealthy investors. While those institutions still account for most trading volume, retail investors are becoming an increasingly important source of liquidity and market activity.
That growth is being powered by mobile-first investing platforms such as Bamboo, Trove, Risevest, and Cowrywise.
These apps are lowering the barriers to stock investing, allowing users to buy shares from their phones with amounts that would once have been considered too small for traditional brokers to serve profitably.
The 19-Year Market Shift
Hit play to watch ₦Trillions flow into the Nigerian Exchange.
The changing nature of the market became evident in April when Bamboo, which launched access to NGX-listed stocks in May 2024, overtook CardinalStone, an institutional investment management firm, to become the exchange’s largest broker by weighted market share.
Bamboo said it executed 542,582 trades during the month, giving it an 11.13% market share.
“In April of this year, we became the number one broker on the NGX by its own composite measure, which measures a weighted market share figure that combines equity value, equity volume, equity deals across bonds and exchange traded funds (ETFs),” Richmond Bassey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Bamboo, told TechCabal.
Bamboo’s average trade size, at just ₦71,609 ($51.89), compared with CardinalStone’s ₦2.57 million ($1,862), mirrors market reality, where domestic institutional investors accounted for 51.45% of all trading transactions in the first five months of 2026.
In the week leading to February 16, 2026, the NGX gained ₦6.79 trillion ($4.92 billion) following a regulatory shift by the National Pension Commission, which led to a wave of institutional buying.
On February 9, PenCom raised the equity investment limits for Pension Fund Administrators within their Retirement Savings Account Funds, allowing PFAs to allocate a significantly higher proportion of their assets to the stock market.
“The reform was key to raising the equity allocations for PFAs that forced a lot of PFAs to now rebalance towards equities and new capital flow into the markets,” Bassey said. “Institutional money is coming into the markets. There was also the banking sector recapitalisation.”
Overall equity transactions on the NGX have risen 131.21% as of May 31, 2026. Domestic investors, institutional and retail, accounted for 87.67% of all trading activity, while foreign investors accounted for 12.33%.
Who is Driving the NGX?
Tap a timeframe to see the ₦Trillions flowing across the exchange.
Domestic vs. Foreign
Inside the Domestic Market
A lot of the activity on the domestic retail front has also been helped by the changing age demography of stock investing.
“It is exciting to see a lot of young Nigerians embracing local investing, and we are very happy to be at the forefront of making this happen,” Bassey said.
According to Bamboo, 73% of its users are between 18 and 34 years old.
When Bamboo was founded in 2019, its main attraction was access to US stocks. Today, the company’s Nigerian stock business is beginning to outpace its foreign offering.
“Bamboo saw for the first time more trading activity on the NGX in the first quarter than the US stock market. Trading volume was ₦87 billion ($61 million) compared to $55 million for US stocks. NGX traders outnumbered US traders nearly 3:1,” the company noted in an emailed response to TechCabal on June 1.
The road to a deeper market
The success of mobile-first companies such as Bamboo has forced traditional financial institutions to respond. Stanbic IBTC has launched BluNest, and Meristem offers Meritrade.
In 2024, NGX also introduced NGX Invest, an e-offering platform to improve capital flow between investors and the market.
Yet questions remain about how liquid, a measure of how easy it is for investors to buy or sell stocks quickly without causing sharp price movements, the NGX really is. Despite serving a country of more than 200 million people, Nigeria’s stock market is worth just $109.3 billion.
By comparison, South Africa’s Johannesburg Stock Exchange, serving a population of more than 60 million people, is valued at roughly $1.46 trillion.
“There isn’t a lot of high-frequency trading activity. Our market is still very young, and there are many challenges to solve. There are not so many options; there are no derivatives. There are many opportunities to grow the market,” Bassey said.
Mobile investing has succeeded in bringing more Nigerians into the market. Whether it can help transform the NGX into a deeper, more liquid exchange is now dependent on whether there will be more listings and new products to match the growing appetite of retail investors.
True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks.
Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
English (US) ·