Pakistan's Generation Z is driving a significant surge in new retail investors at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), with data showing that investors aged 18 to 30 accounted for more than 41 percent of all new registrations between August and May of the outgoing fiscal year. A total of 74,629 young investors opened accounts during this period, part of a broader influx of 180,148 new retail participants.
Why Gen Z Is Turning to Stocks
For 23-year-old Isra Ghous Rasool, the stock market offers not just financial returns but also a break from the traditional nine-to-five job. “Quite literally, the only reason is that it’s a way for me to get money while I’m sitting at home and not, you know, going out and doing your classic nine-to-five,” she told Arab News. Rasool actively invests in stocks and compares them against gold, cryptocurrency, and forex. She has increased her investment portfolio sixfold to Rs100,000 ($360) this year.
Another young investor, Abdul Qadir, a 23-year-old BBA student specializing in finance, has grown his stock portfolio by 800 percent to Rs450,000 ($1,620) in about a year, starting with just Rs50,000 ($180) by buying his first stock in Al Shaheer Corporation, a meat company. He invests in oil, banking, and automobile sectors and runs a small mutual fund, charging a brokerage fee while offering an average return of 8 percent.
Market Performance and Economic Context
The benchmark KSE-100 index has delivered an annualized return of about 66 percent in dollar terms over the past three years, the highest in the region, according to Aamir Mushtaq Kanju, PSX’s deputy general manager of lead product management and research. He attributed this to macroeconomic stability achieved through a $37 billion IMF loan program. On Wednesday, the index rose by 1.1 percent to 179,571.27 points, bringing its year-to-date advance to 43 percent or 53,944 points.
PSX’s Growth and Targets
Kanju noted that Gen Z accounts for around 40 percent of total account openings, and the average monthly account openings at PSX have tripled to 15,000 this year. However, Pakistan’s investor population remains less than 0.2 percent of the total population, compared to India’s 6 percent and Bangladesh’s 1-2 percent. PSX aims to reach 2.5 million Unique Identification Numbers (UINs) from 563,000 within two years, targeting about 1 percent of the population.
Expert Insights and Future Plans
Jibran Sarfaraz, an equity analyst at Munir Khanani Securities Ltd., views stock investing as a learning process for Gen Z, teaching them how listed companies function, earnings, and profit and loss accounts. Qadir aims to grow his portfolio to Rs10 million ($35,971), while Rasool remains committed to investing, believing that Rothschild and Goldman Sachs built their wealth similarly. She added, “We need something that multiplies.”
