Financial behavior of individual investors in Chinese stock markets

Abstract

As the market entity, the investment behavior of individual investors play a key role for the operation of securities market. The early research of investors’ financial behavior mainly includes the classic theories such as Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT). However, many anomalies cannot be well explained by traditional financial theory. In actual, there exists a large amount of irrational investors in the market. Combined with the practical situation of Chinese policy-oriented market and the characteristics of Chinese individual investors, the circumstance is more serious in Chinese market. Thus, applying financial behavior theory to investigate the investment decision of investors is necessary. This article adopts financial behavior theory and data analysis to examine the two main anomalies of Chinese individual investors, which are herding behavior and overconfidence phenomenon. Also, it proposes the corresponding policy suggestions for Chinese stock market.