Individual Investors Sentiments and Asset Pricing

Abstract:     
Individuals often invest in securities based on approximate rule of thumb, not strictly in tune with market conditions. Their emotions drive their trading behaviour, which in turn drives asset (stock) prices. Investors fall prey to their own mistakes and sometimes others' mistakes, referred to as herd behaviour. Markets are efficient, increasingly proving a theoretical concept as in practice they hardly move efficiently. The purely rational approach is being subsumed by a broader approach based upon the trading sentiments of investors. In this approach, security expected returns are determined by both risk and misvaluation. These are some of the issues of greater relevance to the capital market. The present paper documents the role of emotional biases towards investment (or disinvestment) decisions of individuals, which in turn force stock prices to move. The authors used a questionnaire to judge the impact of emotions on their investment related decisions and conclude that the majority of individual investors often ignore fundamentals of investments and go by their prejudice about the worth of the security in question.

Keywords: Individual investors, Emotional biases, Herd behaviour, Investment decision, Rational analysis

Accepted Paper Series