论文部分内容阅读
Although finance has been studied for many decades, behavioral finance which considers the human behaviors in finance isa quite new area.Behavioral finance theories, which are based on the psychology, attempt to understand how emotions and cognitive errors influence individual investors behaviors (investors mentioned in this study are referred to individualinvestors). The main objective of this study is exploring the behavioral factors influencing individual investors decisions at the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange.Furthermore, the relations between these factors and investment performance are also examined.As there are limited studies about behavioral finance inKazakhstan, this study is expected to contribute significantly to the development of this field in Kazakhstan. The study begins with the existing theories in behavioral finance, based on which,hypotheses are proposed.Then,thesehypotheses are tested through the questionnairesdistributed to individual investors at the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange.Thecollected data are analyzed by using SPSS and AMOS software.Semi-structured interviews with some managers of the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange are conducted to have deeper understanding of these behaviors. The result shows that there are five behavioral factors affecting the investment decisions of individual investors at the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange: Herding, Market, Prospect,Overconfidence-gambles fallacy, and Anchoring-ability bias.Most of these factors have moderate impacts whereas Market factor has high influence.EFA (Exploratory Factor Analysis)identified different aspects of behavioral factors that have significant effect on investment decisions of individual investors in Kazakhstan Stock Exchange.