Nairobi, July 8 -- Wealthy investors in the stock market have booked Sh39.51 billion paper gains on their shares at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) in the past 12 months to Wednesday, cementing the bourse's reputation as one of the quickest paths to prosperity.

The billionaire investors include bank executives James Mwangi and Gideon Muriuki, the Kenyatta and Ndegwa families, the Shah family of I&M Group and long-term market investors Baloobhai Patel and John Kibunga Kimani.

Their long-term investments in some of the top blue-chip firms on the NSE continue to pay off as the bourse recovers from a prolonged bear run that stripped their portfolios of billions of shillings between 2015 and 2022.

In the past 12 months, the NSE has ad...