Heterogeneity of household stock portfolios in a national market

We study the long term dynamics of the stock portfolios owned by single Finnish legal entities in the Helsinki venue of the Nasdaq Nordic between 2001 and 2024. Using the Herfindahl–Hirschman index as a measure of concentration for the composition of stock portfolios, we investigate the concentration of Finnish household portfolios both at the level of each individual household and tracking the time evolution of an aggregated Finnish household portfolio. We also consider aggregated portfolios of two other macro categories of investors one comprising Finnish institutional investors and the other comprising foreign investors. Different macro categories of investors present a different degree of concentration of aggregated stock portfolios with highest concentration observed for foreign investors. For individual Finnish retail investors, portfolio concentration estimated by the Herfindahl–Hirschman index presents high values for more than half of the total number of retail investors. In spite of the observation that retail stock portfolios are often composed by just a few stocks, the concentration of the aggregated stock portfolio for Finnish retail investors has a portfolio concentration comparable with the one of Finnish institutional investors. Within retail investors, stock portfolios of women present a similar pattern of portfolios of men but with a systematic higher level of concentration observed for women both at individual and at aggregated level.