Authors: Maksim P., Opus 4.6
Story is that despite the cash oversaving culture there’s a chance that new infrastructure does enable a much more resilient base of long-term investors.
In the last post, we looked at nearly €3 trillion in German bank deposits quietly losing purchasing power — a family in Stuttgart down 23% in real terms while a family in Oslo accumulated €16,700 in German corporate equity without lifting a finger.
But there's a counter-story forming. Germany's fund industry now manages €4.9 trillion [2] — more than the deposit pile itself. Not all of that is retail money, but it's all someone's money: pensions, insurance, retirement provisions, and increasingly, direct retail investments.
Fourteen million Germans now own stocks, funds, or ETFs. That's a record — one in five adults [1]. The Deutsches Aktieninstitut published the numbers in January, and the coverage was predictably celebratory. So was the scepticism: retail euphoria, another bubble, same story.
Germany has been here before.
In 2002, after the dotcom boom, 11.5 million Germans held equity investments — 18% of the population. Then the crash finished what it started, and it took nearly two decades to recover those numbers. In 2007, participation stood at 10.3 million. The financial crisis sent it to 8.4 million.
The pattern was reliable: markets rise, Germans discover equities, markets fall, Germans go home.
So the question isn't whether 14.1 million is a record. It's whether this cohort behaves differently when markets fall.
We have a data point.
In 2022, global equities fell 15–20%. For a typical diversified retail investor, a clear double-digit drawdown. Under the old pattern, this is where Germans leave.
They didn't.
The total number of equity investors grew — from 12.1 to 12.9 million [1]. But the composition tells you more than the headline.
Fund and ETF holders surged by 1.6 million. These are Sparplan investors — people with automated monthly contributions into diversified products. Setting up a €50 monthly ETF Sparplan on a neobroker app takes two minutes. Cancelling it requires active intervention. Inertia, for once, working in your favour.
Meanwhile, stock-only holders — people whose entire equity exposure was individual shares, no funds, no ETFs — dropped by 784,000 [1]. The classic cyclical pattern: retail stock-pickers entering at highs, exiting at lows. But many didn't leave the market. They migrated into diversified products.
