Análisis del comportamiento de los inversores individuales en los mercados bursátilesla utilidad de la información contable en la toma de decisiones

Abstract

Undoubtedly, accounting and financial information is one of the most useful sources of information when we have to assess a company, and therefore to decide whether to invest in it or not. Accounting and financial information is, in fact, the most important source of information for long-term investments although on the short term, charts or similar analyses assume greater importance in the decision making process. However, when it comes to long-term investment and longitudinal analysis of companies, the accounting and financial information published by companies should reflect the true and fair view of them and, therefore, it is an extremely useful source of information for the decisions of all investors, and especially for individual investors who have less access to other types of sources, so the cost to get that information is much higher. However, individual investors are more influenced by other variables. According to the results of the ININBE questionnaire (Pascual-Ezama et al., 2010), although accounting and financial information does not have a particularly low valuation by investors, its usefulness is much lower than other variables such as expectations and intuitions, facilities for investment or past performance, which is also consistent with results from other researches (Haslem & Baker, 1973; Nagy & Obenberger, 1994; Clark-Murphy & Soutar, 2004). Therefore, it seems that those types of variables are much more important for individual investors than accounting and financial information...