ISO 9001:2015

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCED RESEARCH IN COMMERCE, MANAGEMENT & SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJARCMSS) [ Vol. 9 | No. 2 (I) | April - June, 2026 ]

The Impact of Specific Personality Traits on Investor Behavior in Stock Market Investment

Ms. Beena Chandwani & Dr. Ruchi Jain

The traditional theory on finances traditionally hinges on the notion that the investors always make decisions through rational reasoning. In such a case, the decisions made by investors are expected to be logical and, therefore, objective. The reason for this is that almost all models in finance, ranging from the basic CAPM models to complex models, rest on these assumptions, to an extent where they are even presumed to have similar expectations. Nonetheless, the traditional model faces contradiction by behavioral finance which claims that investors can behave irrationally under certain circumstances. The crucial importance of behavioral finance could not have been emphasized more clearly than during the post-millennium period when the dot-com bubble was created and later burst. During this period, there was a clear manifestation of the herd behavior among investors, which meant that they tended to invest funds in stocks ending with ".com." As a result, this frenzy led to the overvaluation of these tech stocks way above their intrinsic value. This scenario is almost identical to what preceded the subprime crisis, when home prices in the US rose sharply to unsustainable heights and were greatly detached from the true value of the properties. In both cases, the markets witnessed bubbles that eventually collapsed, causing a collapse in asset prices and loss of savings for many people. However, the case of irrational market behavior does not represent a modern peculiarity since it has been around in the 16th century Holland. Tulip Mania refers to the period in which bulbs imported from Constantinople experienced high interest among the elite in Holland, which was accompanied by an escalation in buying and selling these products to such an extent that this process became common practice on the European stock markets and the cost of bulbs reached record levels. With time, the price began to decrease due to overproduction compared to consumer demand for tulips, thus forcing many investors to default on their obligations resulting in huge financial losses because of the collapsed bubble. All this served to highlight an important drawback of financial models – their inability to account for the essential softer components influencing the process of making decisions. Psychological factors, for example, have been either overlooked or ignored by most theoretical models until the works of Kahneman and Smith. In particular, they have contributed to bringing to light the ideas of behavioral sciences that investors' decision-making under uncertainty is less than perfect and follows what one may call 'the normal behavior'. This paper attempts to provide a thorough analysis of the interconnection between certain personal traits and investments conducted by individuals. In order to perform the research, there was conducted a survey among approximately 105 investors who trade on the stock exchange. Investors in question were classified according to several categories, such as gender, ages, earnings, number of dependents, occupation, and marital status. The data used for research purposes is comprised of primary sources of information collected directly from the investors under consideration as well as secondary sources of information. Convenience sampling approach was used to choose a sample of investors. In order to evaluate the personality dimensions of respondents, "Big Five personality test" was used. The research thereafter carries out a meticulous analysis of the relationship that exists between these tested personality traits and the investment behavior that is observed. In this regard, the research will seek to assess personalities of investors with respect to some main criteria like extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness among others and thereafter establish how these relate to their choice of investments in the stock market. The lessons learned from this study are highly useful for different types of financial professionals such as portfolio managers, fund managers, and wealth managers. Knowing about the mentality and behavior of their clients can help these financial advisors to create better portfolios for their clients. While the portfolios created through this knowledge might not be completely optimal from a mathematical standpoint, it will definitely be much easier to follow and cooperate with the client on it. In this regard, this study seems to be relevant given the present state of the economy in the world where all economies are in a post-recession recovery phase. In the end, the careful inclusion of behavioral finance concepts into the disciplined world of fundamentals-based finance promises great rewards for a broad spectrum of beneficiaries, including individuals like portfolio managers and equity analysts, while making a more general contribution to wealth creation in developing countries as they emerge from economic recessions.

  1. Anic, Gabriella (2007). The association between personality and risk taking. Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/605
  2. Barsky, R. B., Juster, F. T., Kimball, M. S. & Shapiro, M. D. (1997). Preference parameters and behavioral heterogeneity: An experimental approach in the Health and Retirement Study, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112(2), 537-579.
  3. Chen, H., & Volpe, R. P. (2002). Gender differences in personal financial literacy among college students. Financial services review, 11(3), 289-307.
  4. Carducci, B.J. and Wong, A.S. (1998), “Type a and risk taking in everyday money matters”, Journal of Business and Psychology, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 355-359.
  5. Chang, S.J. Van Witteloostuijn, A. and Eden, L. (2010), “From the editors: common method variance in international business research”
  6. Charness, G. and Gneezy, U. (2010), “Portfolio choice and risk attitudes: an experiment”, Economic
  7. Inquiry, Vol. 48 No. 1, pp. 133-146.
  8. Chen, T.H., Ho, R.J. and Liu, Y.W. (2018), “Investor personality predicts investment performance? A statistics and machine learning model investigation”, Computers in Human Behavior.
  9. Cheng, P.Y. (2007), “The trader interaction effect on the impact of overconfidence on trading performance: an empirical study”, Journal of Behavioral Finance, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 59-69.
  10. Corter, J. E., & Chen, Y. J. (2006). Do investment risk tolerance attitudes predict portfolio risk? Journal of Business and Psychology, 20(3), 369. 
  11. Dutta, M., Halder, A. K., & Singh, S. Anic, G. (2007). The association between personality and risk taking.B. (2010). Morphology and properties of hot dip Zn–Mg and Zn–Mg–Al alloy coatings on steel sheet. Surface and Coatings Technology, 205(7), 2578-2584. 
  12. Grable, J.E. and Roszkowski, M.J. (2008), “The influence of mood on the willingness to take financial risks”, Journal of Risk Research, Vol. 11 No. 7, pp. 905-923.
  13. Grinblatt, M. and Keloharju, M. (2000), “The investment behavior and performance of various investor types: a study of Finland’s unique data set”, Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 55 No. 1, pp. 43-67.
  14. John OP (1990) The big fi ve factor taxonomy; dimensions of personality in the natural language and in questionnaires. In: Pevlin LA (ed) Handbook of personality theory and research. Guilford, New York, pp 66–100
  15. McCrae RR, Jang KL, Livesley WJ, Riemann R, Angleitner A (2001) Sources of structure: genetic environmental, and Arti-factual influences on the Co-variation of personality traits. J Pers 69:511–535
  16. McCrae, R.R., & Costa, P.T. Jr. (2003) As cited in Shukla, Priyanka. & Pradhan, Madhurima. (2011). Modifying Risk Taking Behaviour to Prevent HIV, Ph.D Thesis, Department of Psychology, University of Lucknow.
  17. Mishra, S., Lalumière, M. L., Morgan, M., & Williams, R. J. (2011). An examination of the relationship between gambling and antisocial behavior. Journal of Gambling Studies, 27(3), 409426. 
  18. Mohamad Anuar Md Amin, Nur Azura Sanusi, Suhal Kusairi and Zuhura Mohamed Abdallah (2014). Inverse relationship of financial risk and performance in commercial banks in Tanzania. Investment Management and Financial Innovations, 11(4-1).

DOI:

Article DOI:

DOI URL:


Download Full Paper:

Download