We survey clients of a German online bank to study retail investors' beliefs about the autocorrelation of annual returns of the aggregate stock market, and the role of these beliefs in financial decisions. A majority of our respondents believe in mean reversion of aggregate returns, and these...

We show that preferred investment styles can be determined by the big five personality traits. Using this result, we build a tool that recommends investment styles. The resulting recommendations are significantly higher rated than random recommendations.We collected detailed personality traits...

Using data for about 50,000 actual household investment accounts, we document that financial advice reduced investors’ tendency to leave the stock market during the market crash of 2008 and had a positive correlation with their decisions to return to the market. In addition, we provide a...

Individuals' stock market participation depends on the risk–return trade-off they expect to achieve from investing. We argue that the expected economic benefits from investing are highly heterogeneous. To capture these benefits, we define the personal equity risk premium (PERP) as the...

The aim of financial institutions and regulators is to find an effective way to measure the risk profile of different segments of investors. Both economists and psychologists developed several methodologies to elicit and assess individual risk attitude, but these are not perfect and show several...

The "Fear of Missing Out" or FoMO has become an accepted motivator of behaviours extending from the purchase of limited-edition sneaker brands to social media use and cryptocurrency investment. As a motivator of individual financial behaviours, such as cryptocurrency and stock investment, it is...

Individuals invest in Environmental-Social-Governance (ESG)-assets not only because of (higher) expected returns but also driven by ethical and social considerations. Less is known about ESG-conscious investor subjective beliefs about crypto-assets and how these compare to traditional assets....

How does memory shape individuals' financial decisions? We find experimental evidence of a self-serving memory bias. Subjects over-remember their own positive investment outcomes and under-remember negative ones. In contrast, subjects who did not invest but merely observed outcomes do not have...

Purpose This study aims to investigate the occurrence of the decoy effect in stock investment decisions based on fundamental analysis. Design/methodology/approach In this study, the decoy effect was investigated by applying two questionnaires, one of them with the presence of a decoy...

This paper investigates whether false confidence, as characterized by a high level of personal mastery and a low level of intelligence (IQ), results in frequent investor trading and subsequent investor wealth erosion across time. Using the National Longitudinal Survey (NLSY79), change in wealth...