Standard strategies to make trust management more accessible

The past year’s expansion in brokerage services came together with an ongoing boom in the segment of standard trust management strategies — a practice of simultaneously managing assets of multiple clients with the same risk profile under uniform rules.

These strategies make trust management more accessible to mass-market investors: the entry investment requirement is upwards of just 10 thousand rubles, while the average investment portfolio under standard strategy rules declined from 1.4 million to 700 thousand rubles in two years.

Throughout 2020, trustees, like brokers, increasingly used complex structural products in strategies. Beginning investors struggle to understand these financial instruments; the Bank of Russia therefore recommended that market participants refrain from selling such products before mandatory tests are introduced to ensure investors have sufficient knowledge of financial instruments.

More details of stock market trends in 2020 are presented in Review of Key Indicators of Professional Securities Market Participants.