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This paper synthesizes existing experimental research in the area of investor perceptions and offers directions for future research. Investor-related experimental research has grown substantially, especially in the last decade, as it has made valuable contributions in establishing causal links, examining underlying process measures, and examining areas with little available data. Within this review, I examine 121 papers and identify three broad categories that affect investor perceptions: information format, investor features, and disclosure credibility. Information format describes how investors are influenced by information salience, information labeling, reporting and accounting complexity, financial statement recognition, explanatory disclosures, and proposed disclosure changes. Investor features describes investors’ use of heuristics, investor preferences, and the effect of investor experience. Disclosure credibility is influenced by external and internal assurance, management credibility, disclosure characteristics, and management incentives. Using this framework, I summarize the existing research and identify areas that would benefit from additional research.

Investor risk perception is a personalized judgement on the uncertainty of returns pertaining to a financial instrument. This study identifies key psychological and demographic factors that influence risk perception. It also unravels the complex relationship between demographic attributes and investor's risk attitude towards equity investment.

Exploratory factor analysis is used to identify factors that define investor risk perception. Multiple regression is used to assess the relationship between demographic traits and factor groups. Kruskal–Wallis test is used to ascertain whether the factors extracted differ across demographic categories. A risk perception framework based on these findings is developed to provide deeper insight.

There is evidence of the relationship and influence of demographic factors on risk propensity and behavioural bias. From this study, it is apparent that return expectation, time horizon and loss aversion, which define the risk propensity construct, vary significantly based on demographic traits. Familiarity, overconfidence, anchoring and experiential biases which define the behavioural bias construct differ across demographic categories. These factors influence the risk perception of an individual with respect to equity investments.

The reference for the framework of this study is limited as there has been no precedence of similar work in academia.

This paper establishes that information seekers make rational decisions. The paper iterates the need for portfolio managers to develop and align investment strategies after evaluation of investors' risk by including these behavioural factors, this can particularly be advantageous during extreme volatility in markets that concedes the possibility of irrational decision making.

This study highlights that regulators need to acknowledge the investor's affective, cognitive and demographic impact on equity markets and align risk control measures that are conducive to market evolution. It also creates awareness among market participants that psychological factors and behavioural biases can have an impact on investment decisions.

This is the only study that looks at a three-dimensional perspective of the investor risk perception framework. The study presents the relationship between risk propensity, behavioural bias and demographic factors in the backdrop of “information” being the mediating variable. This paper covers five characteristics of risk propensity and eight behavioural biases, such a vast coverage has not been attempted within the academic realm earlier with the aforesaid perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships among perception of past portfolio returns, optimism and financial decisions.

The relationships are examined using a data set of both retail and institutional investors in Malaysia and estimated using ordinary least square regression.

The results demonstrate that perception of past portfolio returns influences both retail and institutional investors’ trading and risk taking. Optimism measured as relative investment optimism and personal investment optimism similarly influences both groups of investors’ financial decisions. However, perception of past portfolio returns causes only retail investors to exhibit optimism. The results furthermore show that only for retail investors perception of past portfolio returns indirectly influences financial decisions, through the mediating channel of optimism.

The findings on the influences of perception of past portfolio returns and the mediating channel in decision process help to understand the differences between retail and institutional investors. Retail investors are found to be more susceptible to optimism. Therefore, regulators in Malaysia may enhance their initiatives by incorporating the peril of forming optimistic expectations in financial decisions, by giving special focus on retail investors.

This paper focuses on investors’ perception of past portfolio returns and its influence on various financial decisions, unlike past portfolio returns or market returns. Also, this paper is among the first to demonstrate the mediating channel of optimism in investors’ decision process.

This paper aims to show how overconfidence influences the decisions and performance of individual investors trading on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), with the mediating role of risk perception and moderating role of financial literacy.

The deductive approach was used, as the research is based on the theoretical framework of behavioural finance. A questionnaire and cross-sectional design were employed for data collection from the sample of 183 individual investors trading on the PSX. Hypotheses were tested through correlation and regression analysis. The Baron and Kenny method was used to test the mediation effect of risk perception and the moderation effect of financial literacy. The results of mediation and moderation were also authenticated through the PROCESS and structural equation modelling (SEM) technique.

The results suggest that risk perception fully mediates the relationships between the overconfidence heuristic on the one hand, and investment decisions and performance on the other. At the same time, financial literacy appears to moderate these relationships. The results suggest that overconfidence can impair the quality of investment decisions and performance, while financial literacy and risk perception can improve their quality.

The paper encourages investors to base decisions on their financial capability and experience levels and to avoid relying on heuristics or their sentiments when making investments. It provides awareness and understanding of heuristic biases in investment management, which could be very useful for decision makers and professionals in financial institutions, such as portfolio managers and traders in commercial banks, investment banks and mutual funds. This paper helps investors to select better investment tools and avoid repeating the expensive errors that occur due to heuristic biases. They can improve their performance by recognizing their biases and errors of judgment, to which we are all prone, resulting in better investment decisions and a more efficient market. The paper also highlights the importance on relying on professional knowledge, giving it greater weight than feelings and biases.

The current study is the first to focus on links between overconfidence, financial literacy, risk perception and individual investors' decisions and performance. This article enhanced the understanding of the role that heuristic-driven bias plays in the investment management, and more importantly, it went some way towards enhancing understanding of behavioural aspects and their influence on the investment decision-making and performance in an emerging market. It also adds to the literature in the area of behavioural finance specifically the role of heuristics in investment strategies; this field is in its initial stage, even in developed countries, while, in developing countries, little work has been done.

This study examines how the importance of external investment environment factors affects stock market perception, and how stock market perception affects stock investments after stock market crash witnessed by individual investors in one of the emerging stock markets.

A cross-sectional survey was administrated among 223 individual investors who experienced stock market crash in 2010–2011 in Bangladesh, and the proposed model was tested by the partial least squares-structural equation modeling PLS-SEM model.

Findings show that the importance of Bangladesh's stock market performance, government policy, economic issues and neighboring country's stock market performance have effects on investors' stock market perception. This perception, in turn, decreases monthly stock trading and short-term investment horizon. The findings further show the mediating effect of stock market perception.

Investors need to carefully consider the external investment environment when they form their stock market perception, as this perception drives stock investments. Analogously, regulators should ensure releasing timely and updated statistics on external investment factors.

Addressing those investors who encountered stock market crash, a set of external investment environment issues, stock market perception and stock investments are new in the literature.

This study aims to assess the impact of personality traits, risk perception and perceived coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) disruption on the investment behavior of individual investors in the Indian stock market.

This study adopts a survey approach. The sample comprises 315 active retail investors investing in the Indian stock exchange. Two-stage analysis technique regression and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) were used for data analysis. Study hypotheses were tested through regression and ANN was adopted to validate the regression results.

Two regression models were modeled to test the research hypotheses. Findings showed that risk perception and COVID-19 disruption have a significant positive and neuroticism has a significant negative impact on short-term investment decisions, while the role of conscientiousness in determining short-term investment decisions was not found significant. Results also showed a positive impact of neuroticism and conscientiousness and a negative impact of risk perception on long-term investment decisions. The role of COVID-19 disruption was found negative but insignificant in predicting long-term investment decisions.

This study has practical implications for many parties like retail investors, financial advisors and policymakers. This study will assist the investors to realize that they do not always take rational financial decisions. This study will suggest the financial advisors to use the knowledge of behavioral finance in making the advisors' advisory and wealth management decisions. This study will also assist the policymakers to outline behaviorally well-informed policy decisions to protect the interests of investors.

India is one of the fast-growing economies in the world. India has a vast population of active investors and determining investors' investment behavior adds novelty to this study as developed economies have remained the main focus of previous studies. The other novel feature of this study is that this study tries to assess the impact of COVID-19 disruption along with personality traits and risk perception on investment behavior. The other valuable factor of this study is the use of ANN to predict the relative importance of the exogenous variables.

The efficiency of unit trust (UT) funds from quite number of contexts across the globe has been highlighted in previous literature. Yet, there is dearth of research that empirically investigates the factors that influence the selection of UT funds by retailers, particularly in the Malaysian setting. This paper aims to narrow this research gap, whereby perception of past performance, perception of funds’ commitment to Shari’ah compliance, perception of funds’ size and perception of risk tolerance are hypothesized to exert statistically significant influences on the selection of UT funds by retail investors in Malaysia.

The empirical study uses a quantitative research approach whereby survey data have been sampled from 140 retail investors from around Malaysia, using simple random sampling technique. Data analysis has been carried out using multiple regression analysis employing SPSS version 20.0.

The empirical research finds that perceptions of fund size and Shari’ah compliance significantly influence the selection of UT among retail investors in Malaysia. However, there were no enough evidences to support the claims that perceptions of past performance and of risk tolerance influence the selection of UT among Malaysian retail investors.

This research is cross-sectional and uses data from Malaysia only.

The findings from this research will have enormous implications for policymakers in the accounting and finance sectors of government and private financial institutions and for individual professional Malaysian investors. In particular, investors in Malaysia and potential investors abroad may be enlightened by the findings of this research. Again, Islamic financial institutions may use the findings to boost their performance improvement interventions, thus, having clear evidence of the actual factors that influence retailers in the Malaysian setting.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the pioneering research works that empirically explores the factors that influence Malaysian retailers to invest in UT funds. This research is expected to stimulate further research in this novel area.

Mutual funds in India have not been as favourable investment alternatives as in developed countries, as assets under management of mutual funds to gross domestic product in India have been 7-8 per cent compared to 37 per cent globally. Further, investor base of mutual funds has been narrow, as retail investors constitute 98 per cent of folios but contributed only 58 per cent of investments in September 2014. To broaden the investor base for mutual funds in India, it remains imperative to understand the determinants of investment behaviour of investors towards mutual funds. This study aims to achieve this objective.

Based on the theory of planned behaviour, the study examined the effect of awareness, attitude (perception for outcome) and socioeconomic conditions of an investor on his investment behaviour towards mutual funds with the logit model. The results are based on 450 valid responses from the primary survey in Delhi-NCR.

The research provided that investment behaviour could be explained with awareness, perception and socioeconomic characteristics of individual investors. Better awareness related to various aspects of mutual funds will have a positive effect on investment in mutual funds. Contrary to belief, risk perception for mutual funds had no effect on the investment decision. Further, socioeconomic characteristics such as age, gender, occupation, income and education of investors had an impact on the awareness about mutual funds.

As the study has been confined to Delhi-NCR, it should be considered a pilot study and needs to be replicated in other states of India to have more robust results.

The study has implications for mutual funds and regulators. The study highlights a lack of awareness about mutual funds among particular sections of society as a reason for non-investment in mutual funds. The mutual funds and regulators need to focus on females, older age groups and middle-income groups in their efforts to improve their awareness about mutual funds. This would improve their investor base and flow of funds in mutual funds. Furthermore, the process of investment in mutual funds needs to simplified.

In an Indian context, this study has been the first attempt to understand the systematic relation between actual investment behaviour towards mutual funds and various determinants such as socioeconomic characteristics, awareness and attitude (perception) about mutual funds.

This paper aims to show that market power exists in financial markets and analyze how spoofing is used by a high-frequency trader to build market power by taking advantage of both behavioral weaknesses of individual investors and microstructural loopholes of trading venues.

After showing that market power exists in the financial market, this paper centers around the question of how market power is constructed in the financial market. To sharpen the answer to the question, the paper compares the conditions needed for market power construction in the financial market with those needed in the goods market. The paper selects spoofing, the frequently used order-based tactic in high-frequency trading strategies, to analyze in detail how spoof orders can ignite herding with market power building as the essence. The Flash Crash that occurred in the New York Stock Exchange on May 6, 2010 provides an excellent case of market power construction exhibited in spoofing.

The behavioral mechanism of market power construction in the case of spoofing is perception alignment. It becomes effective when two necessary conditions are met: the spoof trader takes advantage of the incomplete order display set up by the exchange; and the behavioral weaknesses exhibited by numerous individual investors. In addition to these key conditions, this paper finds other ones for market power to be created in the financial market. They are easier, quicker, more secret, more flexible and less risky relative to the conditions for market power building in the goods market.

The detailed analysis points to the behavioral mechanism, i.e. perception alignment, and microstructural mechanism, i.e. incomplete order display, that could be responsive to regulation.

The originality of the findings is to uncover the mechanism of spoofing in taking advantage of behavioral biases of individual investors. The value is to gain more complete understanding of the essence of herding caused by spoofing.

The purpose of this paper is to uncover an institutional reason behind herding and the key to successful execution of the accumulation-lift-distribution (ALD) trading strategy.

The paper proposes the perception alignment hypothesis (PAH), which is based on a large number of empirical episodes. Extensive empirical and theoretical literature of 79 articles is reviewed. These are selected from previously unrelated fields of prosecuted cases in market manipulation, sell-side analysts’ recommendations and internet rumors. These studies are put into a unifying conceptual framework.

The proposed PAH can explain some herding episodes that were generated for the purpose of executing ALD.

The value of the approach is that while behavioral biases are hard to change, perception alignment can be more responsive to regulation.

This paper is the first to propose the PAH. It provides an explanation for the causality of herding that complements the traditional literature on the psychological weaknesses of investors. This paper opens a debate on whether the stock market is fully competitive because investors have behavioral biases and certain institutions take advantage of those biases.