The Most Traded Stocks on the Moscow Exchange: What Turnover Measures and What It Does Not Show

The "most traded" stocks are the ones through which the most money passed during the trading day: turnover is calculated as the total value of all trades in an instrument, not as the number of trades and not as the number of shares that changed hands. The list below is built on this criterion and is rebuilt every time the page is opened, so its composition is neither an editorial choice nor a recommendation, but a snapshot of where activity was concentrated yesterday.

What exactly is measured

Turnover is a monetary value. Each trade contributes an amount equal to its price multiplied by its volume, and these contributions are added up over the session. This leads to a property that is often overlooked: an expensive stock does not rise to the top "simply because it is expensive", and a cheap one does not automatically lose out. What matters is the product, not the price in itself. Why the price of a single share is a poor guide in the first place is explained in the article on share price and company size.

It also matters that turnover is calculated per instrument, not per issuer. A company may have several types of shares, and ordinary and preferred shares trade as separate instruments, each with its own order book, its own liquidity and its own line in the ranking. That is why the same company can appear in the list more than once, and this is not a calculation error. What exactly sets such shares apart is explained in the guide to the share classes of a single company.

Why turnover matters at all

Turnover is a practical measure of liquidity, that is, of the ability to enter a position and exit it at a price close to the one you see on the screen. The mechanics are as follows: the exchange order book holds the orders of buyers and sellers, and between the best of them there is a gap, the spread. The denser the flow of trades, the narrower the spread and the deeper the order book, meaning the more orders sit close to the current price. A large market order in a dense book is filled almost entirely at the expected price; in a thin book it "eats through" the nearest levels and is filled at a noticeably worse average price. This is slippage.

Hence the practical meaning of the upper part of the list: trading costs are lower there, and execution is more predictable. For an investor who buys for years, this is secondary; for someone who plans to exit in tranches or to work with a size the market will notice, it is significant.

What turnover cannot tell you

A spike in turnover usually has a cause, and the causes can point either way: the release of financial results, dividend news and the record date, the inclusion of a stock in an index or its removal from one, a corporate conflict, an accident, rumours. Panic selling produces turnover just as high as a buying frenzy does. So a line in the ranking is properly read as the question "why is there so much money here today", not as an answer.

Nor can a stock's style be derived from turnover: both mature companies and fast-growing ones trade actively. Telling them apart by the reason for buying is a separate subject, covered in the article on growth stocks and value stocks.

Why the composition changes every day

Daily turnover is an event-driven figure. It responds to news, to an expiration date, to an inflow of retail investors into a particular story. The list does have a stable core (stocks with a large free float are almost always near the top), but the order within it shifts, and the lower part is refreshed regularly. That is exactly why not a single ticker is named in this text: any such statement would be out of date before it was read.

The key to that stability is the share of the stock that is actually available for trading. Part of an issue may be held by the controlling shareholder or sit on the balance sheets of subsidiaries and take no part in turnover; it is useful to understand what shares outstanding are and how quasi-treasury shares differ from them.

How to use the list

A sensible way to work is this. Step 1: look at who is in the list and ask yourself what is behind the activity; you can check it against the news feed and the dividend calendar. Step 2: go to the instrument's page and look at the business: revenue, debt, valuation multiples, payout history. Step 3: make the decision on fundamental grounds, and use turnover only as an adjustment for the costs of entry and exit. The full set of checks is gathered in the checklist before buying a stock, and the whole list of Russian stocks with filters is in the stocks section.

A note on the data: the ranking is built on turnover for the trading session, using the exchange's data. It does not take over-the-counter trades into account and does not break turnover down by type of participant, so this table cannot tell you who exactly was trading.