Bamboo Leads Retail Trades As Nigeria’s No. 1 Broker First Securities

Bamboo has emerged as Nigeria’s leading First Securities broker for the seventh consecutive month, displaying its dominance through the Nigerian Exchange.

Retail investors accounted for roughly one in every four stock trades executed on the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) between January and July 2026, with Lambeth Capital Limited, through its brokerage partner, Bamboo, driving the bulk of that activity for a seventh consecutive month.

Brand News Day Nigeria understands that, according to the NGX Broker Performance Report for the seven months ended July 31, First Securities Brokers Limited emerged as the overall market leader for the period February to July 2026, garnering 13.5% weighted market share — a composite measure that gives equal weight to a firm’s activity in equities, bonds and ETFs.

Out of 17.3 million total equity deals executed on the NGX during the seven months, Bamboo alone accounted for 3.8 million transactions, or 22% of total deal volume, a scale of retail participation that has positioned mobile-first investing platforms as a defining force in the market’s trading activity this year.

Domestic investors overall accounted for N6.92 trillion, or 87.67%, of total market activity as of May 31, 2026, compared with N973.38 billion, or 12.33%, from foreign investors.

Nigeria’s stockbroking landscape recorded a clear divide in 2026 between institutional-focused firms handling large block trades and retail-driven platforms processing millions of smaller transactions.

First Securities Brokers Limited emerged as the overall market leader through July 2026 with 13.5% weighted market share, driven largely by its dominance of the bond market, where its N105.6bn in traded value exceeded that of all other dealing members combined.

Lambeth Capital Limited, Bamboo’s brokerage partner, ranked second overall with an 8.90% weighted market share, and recorded the highest number of equities deals among all top brokers at 3.85 million, despite trading a comparatively modest N262.99 billion in equity value.

CardinalStone Securities recorded the highest equity value traded among all brokers at N1.63 trillion across 944,888 deals, the largest volume figure in the entire ranking.

The top five brokers, First Securities Brokers, Lambeth Capital, CardinalStone Securities, Meristem Stockbrokers, and Afrinvest Securities, collectively accounted for approximately 40.5% of weighted market activity, reflecting strong concentration among the leading firms.

Lambeth’s Bamboo average ticket size stood at just N68,000 per trade, a figure that strongly suggests the transactions behind this volume are driven by retail investors rather than institutional or high-net-worth participants.

This indicates how deeply mobile trading platforms have penetrated everyday Nigerian households.

First Securities Brokers posted the highest average ticket size among brokers with available deal data, at approximately N5.94 million per transaction, pointing to a strong institutional client base and large block trades.
CardinalStone Securities followed with an average ticket size of about N1.73 million, supported by its market-leading equity value traded.

Lambeth Capital’s N68,300 average, by contrast, was the smallest among the top brokers, despite handling the largest number of equities deals in the entire market.

Meristem Stockbrokers sat between the two extremes, with an average ticket size of roughly N320,000, suggesting a blend of institutional and retail participation.

This divergence illustrates two fundamentally different business models competing for the same market: brokers built around institutional block trading, and brokers built around high-frequency retail transaction volume, a category Lambeth Capital with its Bamboo App has come to dominate almost single-handedly.

Meanwhile, Lambeth Capital’s Bamboo-dominant deal count reflects a much larger shift already visible in the latest NGX-wide investor participation data as of May, 2026.

Between January and May 2026, domestic retail investors traded N2.86 trillion worth of equities, a 138% year-on-year increase, while domestic institutional investors traded N4.06 trillion over the same period, N1.20 trillion more than retail activity.

For every N100 traded on the NGX during this period, approximately N51 came from domestic institutional investors, N36 from domestic retail investors, and N12 from foreign investors.

Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission has attributed the retail surge to mobile trading platforms and growing financial awareness among younger Nigerians, with roughly two million new retail investors entering the market in 2025 alone.

Nigeria’s retail investing boom is not confined to the NGX. Fintech platforms that accept deposits in local currency have provided small-balance retail investors with access to dollar-denominated CFDs and commodity-linked instruments otherwise unavailable locally, a trend now spilling into global CFD and forex trading platforms.