Effects of Behavioural Factors on Human Financial Decisions

In this article, we investigate the factors that may explain the trading volume evolution on two emerging capital markets, Romania and Brazil. We analyze the impact of both investors who ground their trading behaviour on rational expectations and investors who show psychological and emotional facets of the human decision, which we call behavioural errors, as independent variables on the trading volume as dependent variable. The results indicate that trading is influenced by the investors’ irrational behaviour. Thus, the rationality hypothesis can be rejected for both capital markets.