Abstract
We randomly interviewed 2129 individual investors in 17 different provinces in China to study the individual demographic characteristics of Chinese individual investors. We find that (1) 96.33% individual investors are less than 60 years old and only 11.55% of them are retired or are student, which is in sharp contrast to stories of dowdy grandmothers and college graduates among individual investors in China; (2) they are generally well educated (72.03% of them hold a degree above secondary school level); (3) their investment is mostly lower than $ 15,657 (88.09%) and the ratio of investment/income in the stock market is lower than 0.5 (95.4%), which implies their impact on the price changes of financial market may be exaggerated. More interestingly, we also find a robust gender difference in terms of investor sentiment: compared to female individual investors, male individual investors are more i) rational, ii) loss tolerable, and iii) optimistic, as determined by the questionnaire.
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