Do Financial Advisors Matter? Online Channels and Investors' Gambling Preferences

CheWei Liu, Sunil Mithas, J. Po-An Hsieh, Yang Pan
2020 International Conference on Information Systems  
Will financial advisors continue to be relevant as financial firms and investors increasingly embrace newer technologies and channels for trading? This study examines this question; we ask if financial advisors can help to reduce investors' gambling preference, and the role of online channel in attenuating or amplifying this effect. Our results of analyzing data on roughly 20,000 investors with more than 450,000 monthly observations suggest that investors who interact with financial advisors in
more » ... a given month have 2.36% lower holdings of lottery-like securities. Importantly, we also find that interaction with financial advisors reduces investors' gambling preference even more when investors heavily rely on Internet for transactions. These findings drawing on literature at the intersection of information systems and behavioral finance and a rare dataset provide useful insights for investors and financial services firms.
dblp:conf/icis/LiuMHP20 fatcat:l6y342uaafgatptycxvs2mjgia