An Empirical Study of Public Investors’ Financial Information Seeking Behavior in the Stock Market

Information disclosed by listed companies such as financial statement is an important reference source for public investors to know the performance, prospect, investment value of the listed companies and make investment decisions. This paper empirically investigated the influence of years of entry and financial knowledge level on public investors’ information seeking behavior. The results showed that the longer the investors enter the market and being more familiar with financial knowledge, the more likely their searches focus on the information of financial indexes such as listed companies ’s earnings per share, price earnings ratio and return on assets before investment decision making. It also studied the relationship between the use frequency of information source and trust in the source. It is found that the higher degree of investors’ trust in information source, the more frequently they use the source.

Public investors; Financial information of listed companies; Investment decision-making; Information seeking behavior

Lin Wang, Baoling Ding and Wei Liu. An Empirical Study of Public Investors’ Financial Information Seeking Behavior in the Stock Market. 2019 Annual Conference of the Society for Management and Economics (SME 2019). 2019, Vol.4: 1-7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.35532/JSSS.V4.001.