In their article titled “Investor Competence, Trading Frequency, and Home Bias,” Graham, Harvey, and Huang (2009) investigated what they referred to as “competence effect” in the area of trading. According to the authors, the competence effect can be observed when one tends to follow their perceptions and act on them when feeling knowledgeable and skilful (Graham et al., 2009). In other words, it is possible to note that the major focus of the article is the correlation between trading frequency and home bias with the overconfidence of investors.
The authors begin their article with an introduction section where they present the concepts of home bias and trading frequency problems and provide definitions for them. It is explained right away that the focus of the article is the connection of the psychological factors impacting investors on their decisions and trading behavior. Further, the authors preview the first part of the paper and explain that they will attempt to establish correlations between the individual characteristics of investors to their self-perceived levels of competence. The way the article is structured and the authors’ clear communication of their argument, its theoretical background, and intention are the definite strengths of this work. In addition, the article by Graham et al. (2009) represents the field of behavioral finance research that is quite narrow with not many representatives. In that way, every research paper in this area is a valuable new resource that enables understanding of complex phenomena that are often overlooked.
The authors also acknowledged the weaknesses of their work by stating that overconfidence as the major driver of investor behavior is very difficult to predict and estimate because it can be caused by a variety of factors in different professionals. As a result, the findings of the paper are capable of covering only a part of the reasons for the investors’ decisions in terms of trading frequency.
The researchers found that the level of an investor’s competence tends to increase in a strong connection with the quality of the professional’s education; in addition, the relationship between the investors genders and their level of competence was also identified (males tend to have a higher level of the perceived competence) (Graham et al., 2009). Overall, there are a set of qualities and aspects that were used by the researchers to determine the most influential factors driving investor behaviors. Graham et al. (2009) chose to rely on the data collected by the Gallup surveys that took place throughout the middle of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. The rationale behind this choice was that a wider and more diverse base of respondents was accessed, and thus a variety of biases were avoided that could occur in a less versatile sample. However, this strategy also had one significant disadvantage. Since the Gallup data was collected not from a single survey but from several different ones that took place separately, some of the issues that interested the researchers and were relevant to the investigation ended up having insufficient data.
To sum up, the study by Graham et al. (2009) focused on a very interesting issue of the psychological factors that impact investor behaviors. This issue is often overlooked and thus required more research. Besides, the topic is very wide and contains many layers, all of which cannot be covered in a single study.
Reference
Graham, J. R., Harvey, C. R., & Huang, H. Investor Competence, Trading Frequency, and Home Bias. Management Science, 55(7), 1094–1106,