More Brazilians bet online than own a single stock

For a few pandemic years, ordinary Brazilians piled into the stock market. Then rates climbed, betting apps swept in, and that new appetite for risk went looking for somewhere else to go.

For a brief window, the answer was B3, Brazil's main stock exchange. In 2020, the country reached some of the lowest interest rates in its history, near 2%, and with safe yields that thin, millions of Brazilians tried stocks, funds, and trading apps for the first time. B3's retail base peaked around 2021.

But the window closed. As the Selic (Brazil's benchmark rate) climbed back into double digits, safe fixed income became hard to ignore again. Retail investors who had arrived in the cheap-money years faced a new tradeoff: volatile equities and futures on one side, high-yielding conservative products on the other.

Betting apps added another powerful pull. After Brazil moved to regulate online sports betting, a wave of apps (legal sportsbooks alongside grey-market casino games) swept the country. The most notorious, an online slot called Jogo do Tigrinho (Fortune Tiger), alone pulled in over $1.5B in revenue. A lot of traders moved from the regulated market to unregulated bets. For low-income users especially, betting offers a familiar proposition: small stake, instant result, the dream of a quick multiple. Picture a worker who just finished a shift, needs bus fare, and has three reais; increasingly, they will bet it hoping to triple their money.

More Brazilians bet online than own a single stock

Brazilian retail trading has an unusually speculative profile to begin with. Traders are deeply used to futures: B3 data shows a heavy share of trades in derivatives, especially the Ibovespa local index. The decline is specifically a futures-heavy retail story, not a generic one.

Foreign investors, meanwhile, are moving through a separate channel. As global capital rotates across emerging markets, Brazil increasingly reads as the cleaner story: the pull has less to do with Brazil itself than with how risky everywhere else looks, with no exposure to wars or major climate shocks. The Ibovespa's rally gives that rotation a local reason to continue: its recent growth appears to be a key driver attracting offshore investment right now.

This guest article was co-authored with our friend Alessandra Sily, a São Paulo-based International Market Development manager at CME Group. The article represents her views and ours, and not the views of CME Group.