The Bank of Russia has summed up the results of Q2 2026 in the brokerage services market, and behind the record figures for new money inflows lies a less impressive detail: the amount of capital held by the vast majority of retail investors remains symbolic.
53 Million Accounts That Amount to Almost Nothing
According to the Review of Key Brokerage Indicators prepared by the Research and Forecasting Department of the Bank of Russia, the total number of brokerage accounts held by individuals (including multiple accounts opened by the same person with different brokers) reached 59 million in the second quarter. But the regulator also separately counted clients excluding “empty” accounts — those with balances of no more than RUB 10,000 (around $120 at the current exchange rate).
There were only 5.9 million clients with a meaningful balance — exactly one in ten. In other words, the remaining roughly 53 million accounts do not even reach this modest threshold.
Maybe It’s Time to Take a Closer Look at Prop Trading?
With $120 in an account, it is impossible to build any meaningful trading strategy: even an excellent percentage return translates into a laughably small amount of money, while costs and minimum lot sizes eat up the lion’s share of potential profits. It is precisely this gap between the statistics and traders’ ambitions that makes prop trading an interesting alternative for active traders.
Prop firms offer a fundamentally different scale. After passing a qualification challenge, a trader gains access to $5,000–$20,000 in capital, and often $100,000 or more. Yes, part of the profit goes to the firm, and risk management rules are stricter than on a regular brokerage account — but having six figures in capital fundamentally changes the economics of a trade. The very same skill, applied to $50,000 instead of $120, produces a completely different result in absolute terms.
The Rest of the Market Is Qualified Investors’ Money
Interestingly, the bulk of funds in the market is still concentrated among qualified investors — there are already more than 1 million of them in Russia, and they account for 76% of all assets held by individual investors. The average size of a “real” account (excluding small accounts) is RUB 2.3 million.
Against this backdrop, the argument “give traders capital instead of making them spend years saving it” sounds even more compelling for prop trading than usual.