More Women in Singapore Taking the Leap into Investing

They are more digitally savvy, financially independent; online brokers also lower entry barriers

- Angelica Ang

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit Singapore in 2020, Ms Grace Ooi spent many hours watching online videos by financial influencers while riding out the lockdown in her bedroom.

"I started seeing a lot of finfluencers, who would speak of how to do a technical analysis, or what a candlestick chart is.

"They were people who had already reached financial freedom, who would tell me to invest in stocks, and not be a slave to my money, but to make it work for me," said Ms Ooi, 24, an infrastructure consultant who was then an accountancy and business student at Nanyang Technological University.

She decided to put her learning into action. After opening an account with online broker Tiger Brokers, she parked US$3,000 (S$3,900) in various stocks and funds, and has been holding on to her investment despite the recent tariff-induced market see-saw. Ms Ooi is not alone. The Straits Times' checks with six brokerage firms here found an increasing number of women opening securities accounts in the last few years. From 2020 to 2024, Tiger Brokers saw an eighteenfold increase in the number of female account holders in Singapore. Moomoo, another brokerage firm, reported a fifteenfold jump from 2021 to 2025.

OCBC Securities, the stock trading platform of OCBC Bank, noted a similar trend.

"In 2024, the number of new accounts opened by women doubled compared (with) 2019," said Mr Wilson He, managing director of OCBC Securities.

For OCBC Securities, Phillip Securities, Moomoo and Endowus, their male-to-female client ratio has remained largely the same at 3:2 in recent years.

But for Tiger Brokers, the male-to-female ratio has changed from 3:1 to 2:1 between 2020 and 2024. Another investment platform, StashAway, saw an even more drastic change from 7:3 in 2019 to 1:1 in 2024.