October 2026 became a turning point for the market of individual investment accounts of the third type (IIA-3): private investors opened 92,500 new accounts and deposited 43 billion rubles into them. Both indicators turned out to be the highest since December 2025, and the volume of new inflow of funds surpassed all previous months of the current cycle.
The number of new IIA-3 accounts in October grew by 31.6% compared to September and by 41% compared to October of last year. According to Boris Blokhin, Senior Managing Director for Sales and Business Development at the Moscow Exchange, in October "every fourth ruble on the stock market was invested through an IIA."
A distinctive feature of the current cycle is that seasonality has shifted. Traditionally, the peak of account openings falls in December and January, but this time the growth began noticeably earlier than a year ago.
Every fourth ruble — through a preferential account
Over two years of the mechanism's operation, Russians have opened about 1.3 million IIA-3 accounts, with the overwhelming majority of them through brokerage accounts. According to the Bank of Russia, at the end of 2025 there were more than 6.4 million IIA accounts of all types in operation. Over the year their number grew by 345,000, and this increase was six times higher than the 2024 figure.
IIA-3 allows reducing the tax burden, but is suitable only for capital that will not be needed in the coming years: if the account is closed early, the benefits are lost. For the market, this means an inflow of "long" money, which, as a rule, is less likely to leave at the first correction.
Where investors' money goes
Funds from IIA accounts reach the exchange, where total trading turnover in October amounted to 212.9 trillion rubles. The main volume — 169 trillion rubles — was provided by the money market, while trading in stocks, depositary receipts and units reached 2.8 trillion rubles.
In addition to stocks, interest in metals is growing: the volume of trading in precious metals on the Moscow Exchange in October amounted to 590 billion rubles versus 557 billion rubles in September. Exchange-traded gold remains an alternative to stocks for investors when the goal is to protect savings.
At the same time, the growth in client activity has not yet affected the exchange's own profit: the Moscow Exchange's net profit under RAS for the nine months of 2026 declined by 26.8% year-on-year, to 61.61 billion rubles. How sustainable the trend is will become clear only after the December seasonal peak.
Cryptalist analysis: The rapid growth of IIA-3 reflects a structural shift in the behavior of Russian investors — a transition from speculative strategies to long-term accumulation with tax optimization. The inflow of "long" money is capable of increasing the stock market's resilience to corrections, but the sustainability of this trend will be tested by the December peak in account openings. For the crypto market, this is a signal of growing competition for retail capital from regulated instruments.