ABSTRACT
We survey a representative sample of U.S. individuals about how well leading academic theories describe their financial beliefs and decisions. We find substantial support for many factors hypothesized to affect portfolio equity share, particularly background risk, investment horizon, rare disasters, transactional factors, and fixed costs of stock market participation. Individuals tend to believe that past mutual fund performance is a good signal of stockâpicking skill, actively managed funds do not suffer from diseconomies of scale, value stocks are safer and do not have higher expected returns, and highâmomentum stocks are riskier and do have higher expected returns.
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved