Equity Investment Decisions:Determinants for Retail Investors

摘要

Evolution and rationale of management lies in making choices for building the most of resources that are limited in availability. Money is taken as the one amongst the most scarce resources. Therefore, decisions relating to money are taken with extreme caution. Investing is an activity that leads to sacrifice of current consumption of money to some future period with an intention of accumulating some economic value in the meanwhile. Investment in equity has its own specific characteristics. Since individuals differ from each other, retail perspective brings in more complexity to equity investment by adding the element of subjectivity to it. The purpose of this article is to identify variables and their inter-relationships that turn into selection or rejection of equity as an investment avenue by retail investors. It is an attempt to analyze various factors that contribute toward the decision of investing or not investing in equity. Sixteen factors using literature and expert opinion were identified. Interpretive structural modeling (ISM) is applied for developing a generally relevant framework that establishes relationship among these variables. Further, these variables are identified to be operational, strategic, and outcome variables. The developed framework can be used for optimizing the outcome variables for enhancing the investment efficiency.