Romanians preferred to invest in the international markets in gold, electric cars, energy and the financial sector, according to a specialized analysis made by the brokerage house XTB.

“Gold, electric cars, energy and the financial sector have dominated Romanians’ preferences for investing in international markets, and these choices generally suggest a desire to take greater risks, in volatile sectors or with strong movements in trend, hoping for results. The score of high-risk securities versus relatively less risky securities appears to have been 9 to 1. iShares Physical Gold, NIO Inc and Tesla Inc (US) were among the favorites of XTB investors in Romania in 2020. Eight out of ten more traded international instruments with holding on XTB, by the clients from Romania, were shares with holding, and two were ETFs,” it is mentioned in a press release of the company, according to Agerpres.

According to the specialized analysis, the Romanians’ preferences show interesting nuances, in the global trends, with top places for Tesla and Nio, the latter being the most visible competitor in China for the American company.

“On the other hand, the desire for security, illustrated by the first place held by a gold ETF, is only a partial image of Romanian investors. For many of them, the speculative appetite was very high: on positions 4, 5, 8 and 9 are companies in the energy/ oil and gas sector, with a particularly volatile course, in a completely out of the ordinary year. Callon, on which multiple question marks were hovering after the collapse of WTI oil prices, went up on January 15 to a price 3 times higher than the previous year’s lows, and Transocean – at a level almost 4 times higher. Other companies, such as Oasis or Noble have undergone restructuring or have been very close to insolvency. We can talk of a very high appetite for risk, and for securities considered to be ‘bargains’, if we think of DB, the bank on which losses and scandals had imprinted a multi-year downward trend and which had reached almost 95% decrease from the peak of 2007 until the minimum of last year (since then it has recovered almost 100%),” said Claudiu Cazacu, strategy consultant within XTB Romania.

At the end of 2020, XTB investors in Romania had access to over 4,000 financial instruments, of which 2,000 were shares, and the rest, CFDs.