Anthony Bellofatto

Appetite for Information in Mandatory Profiling of Individual Investors

Financial knowledge and the investment in information of retail investors have been under scrutiny on the side of regulators and of academics. Actually, increasing financial literacy of individuals is one of the promising avenues in order to increase financial markets participation. In this paper, we use a natural field experiment offered by MiFID questionnaires to analyze the relationships between personal traits and trading behavior of retail investors who ask for supplementary information. Under a random matching procedure that controls for various survey answers, we analyze the trading characteristics of investors only differing from others on the side of their information appetite. We find that the investors who voluntary ask for more financial information, revealing de facto a particular personality trait, tend to behave more consistently with the Traditional Finance theory. Actually, they trade on a larger stock universe, execute less day-trades and are better diversified. They finally earn higher returns.