Bloomberg TV were reporting that 408,000 brokerage accounts were opened on May 28th. 20 million this year.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2ca3603c-08cb-11dc-b11e-000b5df10621.html The explosion in day-trading has created some unintended consequences in Shanghai in the form of unwashed dinner dishes, badly ironed shirts and dusty floors. In recent weeks the city has developed a shortage of ayis, the domestic helpers who do chores in the homes of middle-class families, because some have found more gainful employment playing the market. Sheng Min, who runs a Shanghai agency that recruits ayis, says it started to face problems finding new domestic helpers in April because of the stock market fever and now has 50 per cent fewer women on its books than usual. "We occasionally receive phone calls from employers complaining about their ayis," he says. "Some of them seem to be more interested in chatting about stocks with their friends than working." Zhang Wei works most weekday mornings in houses around the city, but recently she has been visiting a brokerage in Shanghai's Hongkou district in the afternoons. "Last month I made almost half my salary from investing," she says. With an eye on the new day-traders, an advertisement was placed on the Taobao auction site last week selling doctors' certificates for one month off work for Rmb100 ($13, â¬9.70, £6.60). It has since been removed.