Elon Musk's move pushes more Indians to buy Twitter shares 

Elon Musk wants to buy microblogging and social network platform Twitter. The average retail Indian investor also wants to buy Twitter. The only difference being that the world’s richest person wants to buy the whole company while Indians are buying shares of Twitter.

Data from platforms that allow resident Indians to invest in stocks listed on the US exchanges shows that there has been a significant spike in the quantum of trading in shares of Twitter ever since Musk made his intentions clear.

Vested Finance, a platform registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, witnessed a 100 per cent rise in the quantum of trading in Twitter shares on April 4 when it was disclosed that Musk has acquired a little over 9 per cent stake in Twitter Inc. A similar rise was seen again when Musk made public his intent to acquire the whole company.

Furthermore, in terms of volume of trading, Twitter shares jumped to be in the top five on the platform on a few days in April – a huge jump since Twitter was not even part of the top 100 in March.

In terms of overall volume on the platform as well, Twitter shares accounted for 2.76 per cent of the volume in April, much higher than the 0.13 per cent share in the previous month.

“It is related to the company being in the news and retail investors buying into it. It may not be the best investment strategy though but we do see this happening,” says Viram Shah, Co-founder & CEO, Vested Finance while adding that they regularly tell investors to focus on long-term strategy and not be opportunistic.

In the case of INDmoney, which is among the largest platforms for overseas trading, the average per user transaction value in Twitter shares jumped from $18.23 to $50.89 around the time of the development.

Indians are now looking at increasing their exposure to global equities. It is a diversification strategy and we have seen the trend increase. Also, Indians are using these products everyday whether it is Google, Twitter, Netflix, Facebook or Amazon to name a few. So there is already that connection, which is also a reason for this spike,” says Ashish Kashyap, Founder & CEO, INDmoney.

Another global investing platform Stockal also saw a five-fold rise in the average trading volume of Twitter shares if the days just before and after the Musk announcement are taken into account.

Also read: Twitter kicks off deal negotiations with Elon Musk under shareholder pressure