The perceived importance of electronic sources of financial information to individual investors in Egypt: an empirical investigation

Abstract

This research aims to investigate empirically the perceived importance of various sources of financial information in relation to various investment decisions in the market, and to explore how the new source, electronic sources of financial information (ESFI), stands in relation to them. This study examines the issues from the perspective of individual investors, as a main group of users. Despite the extensive use of ESFI and their websites, especially by individual investors, there has been no research regarding the usefulness of this new source in Egypt. It has been observed that most previous studies focused predominantly on corporate reports (CR) and other traditional sources. In order to gather the data needed for testing related hypotheses, two methods were employed: structured interviews using a questionnaire that was delivered to 120 individual investors, and content analysis of ESFI websites. There was a clear finding that individual investors ranked ESFI as the most important source of information, followed by specialised newspapers and magazines as second, with CR third in importance.