A Portrait of the Individual Investor: Survey Evidence from 17 Different Provinces in China

Abstract

We randomly interviewed 2129 individual investors in 17 different provinces in China to study the individual demographic characteristics of Chinese individual investors. We find that (1) 96.33% individual investors are less than 60 years old and only 11.55% of them are retired or are student, which is in sharp contrast to stories of dowdy grandmothers and college graduates among individual investors in China; (2) they are generally well educated (72.03% of them hold a degree above secondary school level); (3) their investment is mostly lower than $ 15,657 (88.09%) and the ratio of investment/income in the stock market is lower than 0.5 (95.4%), which implies their impact on the price changes of financial market may be exaggerated. More interestingly, we also find a robust gender difference in terms of investor sentiment: compared to female individual investors, male individual investors are more i) rational, ii) loss tolerable, and iii) optimistic, as determined by the questionnaire.

Keywords: Chinese Individual investor, Individual characteristics, Gender difference, Sentiment, Survey

JEL Classification: G11, J16