Paris Bourse loses 2.3 mn investors

The Paris Bourse stock exchange has lost 2.3 million participants since the end of 2008 as the financial crisis turns people off investing, a study by firm TNS-Sofres-SoFia said on Tuesday. The proportion of French people playing the stock market has dropped from 13.8 percent at the end of 2008 to 8.5 percent as of March 2012, the study for France’s La Banque Postale and Les Echos business newspaper said. “There is so much uncertainty since the subprime crisis and the eurozone crisis that individuals no longer really believe in the Bourse,” Michael Pergament, research director at TNS-Sofres, told Les Echos. A poll of 2,002 French people released with the study showed only five percent saying they were interested in buying stocks and only one in 10 saying it was a “good time” to invest on the stock market. The poll, conducted in April, found 91 percent of respondents considered stock holdings “risky”, with 56 percent considering them “very risky”, up from 48 percent in 2011 and 33 percent in 2007.