Self-Reported Investment Performance and Loneliness Among Individual Investors in Japan

This study examines the association between self-reported recent investment performance and loneliness among 158,080 individual investors in Japan using the 2025 Survey on Life and Money. Loneliness was measured using three UCLA loneliness items, and investment performance was classified into five self-reported categories. We estimated probit models with break-even performance as the reference category, adjusting for demographic, socioeconomic, financial, and other observed characteristics, and conducted robustness and Wald tests. In the fully adjusted model, slight and considerable profits were associated with 2.23- and 7.34-percentage-point lower probabilities of loneliness, respectively, relative to break-even performance. These negative associations remained statistically significant under alternative definitions of loneliness. In contrast, results for reported losses were less consistent, with considerable losses positively associated with loneliness under some alternative measures. Wald tests rejected coefficient symmetry between considerable profits and considerable losses, but not between slight profits and slight losses. Joint tests did not find statistically significant evidence of differences in investment-performance coefficients by gender or age group. These findings highlight an association between perceived investment outcomes and loneliness, but the cross-sectional design and self-reported measures preclude causal conclusions.