Pakistan’s youth are entering the stock market — why it matters

By: Ibrahim Agha

For decades in Pakistan, the stock market was seen as a playground for the privileged few. Now, social media influencers are breaking norms, teaching young people to invest and making the market accessible to all.

As a child growing up, like many Pakistanis, I dreamt of emulating global investors like Warren Buffett. Many of us were fascinated by the idea of saving, investing, and letting compounding turn our eidi into a fortune. But for most, this dream remained a distant fantasy. The capital markets were complex, hard to access, and poorly understood.

Today’s youth no longer face those barriers. The Pakistan Stock Exchange has recently allowed minors to open supervised accounts, marking a significant step towards inclusiveness and participation in Pakistan’s capital markets.  Along with this, Content creators on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, like ‘Malik Dollar’ and ‘Mashal Verse’ have been actively educating the masses online about the Stock Exchange and how to start investing. The tide is turning, and the huge knowledge gap that once existed when it came to investing is gradually being closed.

Take Malik Dollar, for example, whose viral videos show how a modest investment in the KSE-100 index years ago could have doubled or tripled by now. For his primarily younger audience, investing is becoming a simpler concept and a tool for building financial independence and wealth.

Over the past year, the Pakistan Stock Exchange has quietly tripled its value. Fund managers were reporting unprecedented triple-digit returns in their stock market funds’ annual reports. It seemed like every other day, there was a headline of the KSE-100 index breaking another personal record. Pakistan is now expecting 16 IPOs in 2026 — it’s strongest pipeline in years.

This is exactly the kind of wealth creation cycle the younger generation does not want to miss. There has been a clear shift in the younger generation’s interest in the stock market as more young Pakistanis begin paying attention to opportunities in investing.

This shift matters because youth participation has the power to transform Pakistan’s economy. Nearly 64% of our population is under the age of 30. If even a fraction of them were to invest in the country’s capital markets, it would yield substantial benefits.

In simple terms, if that 64% started investing, even modest amounts, it would mobilize trillions of rupees into firms. Those firms could then use that money to invest in machinery, technology, or expansion, which would drive productivity and stimulate economic growth. Historically, financing has always been limited in Pakistan due to low FDI and investor sentiment. This rise in youth participation could solve the problem.

By teaching the next generation to invest back into Pakistan’s capital markets, we’re shifting a decades-old mindset that investing in Pakistan is dangerous. If this trend continues, it could reshape how an entire generation thinks about money and investing.

The writer is a freelance columnist