Training Novice Investors to Become More Expert: The Role of Information Accessing Strategy

Considerable research has examined how securities information, once accessed, is cognitively processed to arrive at buy, sell or hold decisions. In contrast, this paper examines whether training novice investors to simply apply the information accessing strategies used by better-performing security analysts, prior to actual cognitive processing of the information, would improve their performance. We obtain performance differences by comparing trained subjects who used the recommended strategies with untrained subjects. Notably, these differences emerged even during a significant market downturn during the simulation. Implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed.