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Identify retail composition within foreign investors in the Helsinki market

Determine the fraction of foreign investors who are retail among nominee-registered and foreign-registered owners of Finnish stocks traded on the Nasdaq Nordic Helsinki venue, overcoming the lack of investor-type labels inherent in nominee registration, in order to quantify the retail share within the foreign-investor population.

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Background

The paper analyzes aggregated portfolios for three macro categories—Finnish households, Finnish institutional investors, and foreign investors—and finds that foreign investors exhibit substantially higher concentration (HHI) than domestic categories, particularly in the early 2000s, likely due to Nokia’s prominence.

However, many foreign investors are nominee registered, and the dataset lacks investor-type labels for these accounts. As a result, the authors explicitly state they cannot determine the retail share among foreign investors and that assessing the precise fraction is impossible with the available data.

References

Due to the fact that the majority of these investors are nominee registered, unfortunately, we are not able to discriminate among these foreign investors the fraction of investors that are retail. Most probably, a large fraction of them could be of retail type but assessing the precise fraction of it is impossible.

— Heterogeneity of household stock portfolios in a national market (2503.17778 - Milazzo et al., 22 Mar 2025) in Section 4, HHI of macro categories aggregated portfolios