Nabtrade’s director of self-managed super fund (SMSF) and investor behaviour, Gemma Dale, said there had been a clear shift in retail investors’ preferences towards cyclical stocks such as energy companies and banks, saying trading in energy stocks had doubled in February.

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Shortages of key natural resources due to the Ukraine war, which has turbocharged some commodity prices, had also driven the shift, while banks are seen as winners from rising interest rates. “Banks and energy, that’s where everybody’s going,” Ms Dale said.

Lockdowns and a wave of stimulus payments fuelled a surge in online share trading in the pandemic, but Ms Dale said younger investors had tended to move to the sidelines lately. The biggest increase in trades placed had been from companies, trusts, self-managed super funds and well-off clients of NAB’s private wealth arm JB Were.

“Smaller, younger, newer investors on average have gone to the sidelines. The trading and investing we’re seeing now is older, far more experienced, wealthier investors. And they’re reshaping their portfolios because they’ve seen this before,” Ms Dale said.

Brokers have reported growing numbers of Australians investing in US stocks in recent years, and there were also some signs that Australian retail investors had moved towards value stocks in US markets.

Stake reported an 89 per cent lift in trade volume in US materials stocks in the last three months, while it also said there was growing demand for an exchange traded fund designed to gain value when the tech-heavy Nasdaq falls.

Ms Dale said electric car maker Telsa was a key exception to the move away from technology stocks, as it remains the most traded US share on Nabtrade, when measured by the number of trades. Ms Dale said this was because the company was seen as the most obvious winner from a rethink about the future of petrol-powered cars.

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