A study on behavioral finance tendencies effective in taking investment desicions with a demographic point of view

Traditional finance approaches justify that factors such as personal traits, psychological states and social environment are ignored at the time when individuals are making investment decisions. According to this point of view, when individuals behave in order to maximize their own purposes, they are "homo economicus" taking rational decisions and by this means, market becomes active by itself. However, this approach falls behind describing the anomalies comprising in the market. Behavioral finance tries to clarify market anomalies by analysing their human sides while investors are taking financial decisions. Behavioral finance, which is quite new in the history of economy, on one side, struggles to explain economical decisions; on the other side, it constitutes an interdisciplinary field of study by being influenced from the fields like psychology and sociology. In this study it has been researched whether behavioral finance tendencies of individual investors and their demographic features demonstrate a significant difference. For this purpose, data from 370 attenders has been collected by an offline survey and convenience sampling method. Collected data has been analysed by SPSS program and has been found valid and reliable in ten dimensions. Dimensions' differences in terms of demographic variables have been analysed by T-test and Anova. The conclusion which has been drawn is that dimensions concerning the effects of behavioral finance tendencies towards investors' decisions don't have significant differences in terms of marital status, various education levels and age range.