Daniel Richards

Research student

You can email Daniel Richards directly; but for media enquiries please contact a member of The Open University's Media Relations team.

Current research

Stock Market Investment Decision Making and Emotion

My academic interest is to examine how everyday people make investment decisions in the share market. Research from the field of behavioural economics has found that investors tend to hold their losing stocks longer than their winning stocks, a behaviour referred to as the disposition effect. The recent downturn in the share market could make this effect very costly for retail investors. However, not all investors are susceptible to this trading behaviour and my interest is to investigate why an investor might not trade in this manner. In particular I am interested in whether using a rationalised decision making process could reduce the disposition effect. Research in the area of heuristics and bias has introduced dual process theory as an explanation of human cognition. This argues that there are two levels of cognition: one at the intuitive level (referred to as system 1) and another at a rational level (referred to as system 2). My research looks to investigate whether or not investors who trust system 1 based cognitive processes are more susceptible to the disposition effect than investors who trust system 2 based processes. Please visit my website for further information

Supervisors

• Professor Mark Fenton-O'Creevy
• Dr Devendra Kodwani
• Professor Janette Rutterford