Retail apps turned owning shares into a quick phone tap. The money seldom reaches the firms it tracks, and the votes pool in very few hands.
Omar Arnaout runs XTB, a brokerage that signed up 864,000 clients in 2025, more than it had gathered in its first two decades combined. The Warsaw-listed firm ended the year above 2.16 million accounts, and roughly four in five newcomers placed their first trade in shares or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) rather than the leveraged contracts that built the business. Asked where the growth ends, Arnaout told Parkiet, a Polish daily, that he still saw no ceiling. In September, Trade Republic, a German rival with more than 10 million customers, opened for business in Poland. Owning a sliver of the world’s largest companies now takes little more than a phone.
Markus Jordan, who runs the research portal extraETF, has counted the machinery behind the shift. The number of ETF savings plans executed each month across continental Europe climbed from 10.8 million in 2024 to 15.1 million in 2025, on figures his firm compiled with BlackRock. Europeans paid 22.7 billion euros into those plans last year, up 29 per cent, and the assets parked on brokerage platforms reached 341 billion euros. Henriette Peucker of Deutsches Aktieninstitut counted 14.1 million Germans holding shares, funds or ETFs in 2025, a record and two million more than the year before. Much of it lands on a standing order; extraETF puts the average German contribution at about 164 euros a month.
Xavier Gabaix of Harvard and Ralph Koijen of Chicago Booth have put a number on what the collective tide does. In work published in 2021 they estimate that every dollar moved into equities raises the aggregate market’s value by about five, and that the lift persists rather than fading. The marginal buyers, mostly index and pension funds, run mandates that fix their equity share, so prices have to move a long way to absorb fresh demand.
A broader base
Gerrit Fey, chief economist at Deutsches Aktieninstitut, tracks who joined the boom and who did not. The under-40s have been Germany’s largest group of investors since 2024, and a million more women bought in last year, a rise of 24 per cent. Income still sorts the rest: about half of Germans earning more than 4,000 euros a month hold equities, against roughly one in eight of those on less than 2,000. The same skew runs across the continent. The European Commission counts around 383 million potential retail investors in Europe and barely 33 million who hold ETFs, with close to 10 trillion euros left idle in bank accounts.
Benjamin Braun, a researcher who has combed the European Central Bank’s distributional accounts, finds listed shares and fund holdings among the most unequally spread of all assets. The ECB’s figures put the wealthiest tenth of euro-area households at 57.3 per cent of net wealth at the end of 2024, a share little changed in years. The richest hold most of the equities, so a rising market lifts their fortunes fastest. The least wealthy fifth hold net wealth below zero. The bottom half keep their savings mostly in deposits and homes.
Lucian Bebchuk and Scott Hirst, who study corporate governance, have traced where the votes attached to all that stock end up. Shares held through an index fund are cast by the manager, not by the person who bought in. The two reckon the Big Three index managers (BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street) together control about a quarter of the votes at S&P 500 companies, and rank as the largest single shareholder in 88 per cent of them. Much of that holding is ETF and retail money whose ballots the firms complete themselves. BlackRock has since let some clients direct their own votes, though few retail savers take up the offer. On most ballots, the manager still speaks for them.
Photo: Dreamstime.