The Belgium Financial Services and Markets Authority has published a new edition of its Retail Investor Dashboard, reporting higher Belgian retail investor activity in the third quarter of 2025 and a continued surge in trading of defence-related shares and ETFs. Around 221,000 retail investors traded shares in the quarter, alongside 110,000 trading ETFs and 19,000 trading bonds. Compared with the previous quarter, the number of active investors increased for shares and bonds while remaining stable for ETFs, with share trading reaching a five-year high. First-time participation totalled 20,000 new investors each in shares and ETFs and 6,000 in bonds, and for the first time in more than a year the number of new ETF investors did not exceed the number of new share investors. Transaction volumes reached more than 1.6 million in shares, about 370,000 in ETFs and 29,000 in bonds, with bond transactions rising for the first time since the second quarter of 2024. Defence-related trading climbed further in 2025, with about 300,000 transactions in the first nine months of 2025, around ten times the annual level seen in 2021–2023; these investments were chiefly EU-focused (over 60% of such transactions in 2024 and 75% in 2025) and concentrated among investors over 50 (almost 70% of transactions), while under-30s accounted for 5%.

Original source View in tracker