2021 retail investing boom has lessons

Covid-19 did what innumerable seminars on investor education could not do for over two and a half decades.

Since early June 2020, the stock market has been on a major bull run. We have had bull runs before, but these 18 months have been revolutionary in one aspect. It is the first time in almost three decades that the Indian retail investor has come to dominate trading on the Indian bourses. And there is a big irony and a lesson in that. After all, “reviving capital markets” and “increasing retail participation” have been the constant refrain of policymakers for decades, especially when the market is down in the dumps, usually due to a series of policy errors.

In the