O impacto da COVID-19 no comportamento dos investidores

  • Carolina Aguiar Pinto Marques Pinho (Student)

Student thesis: Master's Thesis

Abstract

This dissertation aims to investigate the changes in the behavior of individual investors in a crisis period. To this end, the crisis period generated by COVID-19 will be analyzed. In particular, it intends to analyze the changes in the financial assets positions of the individual investors’ portfolios of two different financial instruments associated with different types of risk, stocks and bonds, by studying the changes in the buying and selling of the instruments in different periods of time. We will also analyze the differences in investors' trading activity considering their socio-demographic characteristics. To perform these analyses, we used a database that includes 211.272 transactions from 19.602 individual investors in the Portuguese capital market. A preliminary analysis was performed through ANOVA, in which the results suggest that investors' trading activity changed considerably with the advent of COVID-19, showing an increase in the buy-sell amount spread of stocks and, in general, a decrease in the buy-sell amount spread of bonds. Subsequently, Linear Regressions were performed to analyze the impact of the periods, controlling for the socio-demographic characteristics, for each instrument and estimated via Ordinary Least Squares Method (OLS). The results suggest that there was, effectively, a positive impact of COVID-19 on the buy-sell amount spread of stocks, but a negative impact on the buy-sell amount spread of bonds.
Date of Award19 Oct 2022
Original languagePortuguese
Awarding Institution
  • Universidade Católica Portuguesa
SupervisorJoão Pinto (Supervisor) & Margarida Paula Calado Neca Vieira de Abreu (Co-Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Behavioral finance
  • Individual investors
  • COVID-19
  • Risk propensity
  • Stocks
  • Bonds
  • Sociodemographic characteristics
  • Trading activity
  • Capital market

Designation

  • Mestrado em Finanças

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