scholarly journals An Evaluation Of Factors Influencing Pension Managers Investment Decisions In Kenya

Author(s):  
Lucy Jepchoge Rono

This study focused on the analysis of factors influencing pension fund managers investment decisions. The objectives of the study were to identify investment options available to pension fund managers, identify factors that are considered by fund managers when making investment decisions and identify challenges faced by fund managers in making investment decisions. Three representatives from each of the twelve registered fund managers completed the study questionnaire. The questionnaire was administered through the drop and pick later method. Data was analyzed using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) and summarized using descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, frequencies, percentages. The study found out that returns, investment risks and trends in interest rates were the most important factors affecting pension managers investment decisions. Decision-making preferences, investment portfolio, past performance and legal framework were rated as less important. Consistency and return maximization in the rate of returns (sustainable long term returns), prevailing economic and political situations-inflation, global markets which determines key indicators like interest rates/ exchange and risk profile of the scheme investment (risk assessment of the board of trustees) in that order are also important qualitative factors in decision making for pension fund investment. The research also found out that few investment avenues/ vehicles, bureaucracy in consultations with trustees and unpredictable/ turbulent and dynamic market situations in that order are the major challenges facing fund managers investing pension funds. The researcher identified a need for a portfolio that will give higher returns. There is also need to harmonize all regulations relating to pensions in order to create efficiency and avoid confusion. The research also recommends that RBA benchmarks with the world best in order to help the sector to achieve growth. The promotion of retirement funds and regulatory functions should be separated to avoid conflict of interest in the two roles.

2019 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl-Christian Trönnberg ◽  
Sven Hemlin

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of pension fund managers investment thinking when confronted with challenging investment decisions. The study focuses on the theoretical question of how dual thinking processes in experts’ investment decision-making emerge. This question has attracted interest in economic psychology but has not yet been answered. Here, it is explored in the context of pension funds.Design/methodology/approachThe sample included 22 pension fund managers. The authors explored their decision-making by applying the critical incident interview technique, which entailed collecting investment decisions that fund managers retrieved from recent memory (Flanagan, 1954). Questions concerned the investment situation, the decision-making process and the challenges and uncertainties the fund managers faced.FindingsMany of the 61 critical incidents examined concerned challenging (mostly stock) investments based on extensive analysis (e.g. reliance on external analysts for advice; analysis of massive amounts of hard company and stock market information; scrutiny of company reports and personal meetings with CEOs). However, fund managers to a high degree based their decisions on soft information judgments such as experience and qualitative judgements of teams. The authors found heuristics, intuitive thinking, biases (sunk cost effects) and social influences in investment decision-making.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample is small and not randomly selected.Practical implicationsThe authors suggest anti-bias training and better acquaintance with human forecasting limitations for pension fund managers.Originality/valuePension fund managers’ investment thinking has not previously been investigated. The authors show the types of investment situations in which analytical and intuitive thinking and biases occur.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 964-983 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Dhochak ◽  
Anil Kumar Sharma

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify and rank critical factors influencing investment decisions of venture capitalists. Design/methodology/approach To identify and prioritize factors affecting investment decisions of venture capitalists, a two-phase methodology was adopted: in the first phase, critical factors influencing venture capitalists’ investment decisions were identified using exploratory factor analysis; the second phase entailed the use of a multi-criteria decision-making technique – analytical hierarchal process (AHP) which involved assigning weights to, and prioritizing the identified criteria and sub-criteria. Findings Seven factors were found to significantly influence investment decisions of venture capitalists: entrepreneur’s characteristics, product or services, market characteristics, management skills, financial consideration, economic environment and institutional and regulatory environment. Findings revealed that entrepreneur’s characteristics, financial consideration and product or services were prime influencers of venture capitalists’ investment decisions. Research limitations/implications As for limitations, first, the study considers limited number of factors influencing investment decisions of venture capitalists; there may be other influencers not considered in this study. Second, the AHP methodology assumes that the various decision-making criteria and sub-criteria are independent of each other; in real life, there may be inter-dependency among criteria. Third, the hierarchal model has been tested in the Indian venture capital industry only, and generalizability of results with respect to other industries is questionable. Practical implications The present study identifies and ranks seven factors found to significantly influence investment decisions of venture capitalists. Venture capitalists could use this list of factors as a guideline before making investment decisions, and if considering all factors is not possible, take into account the factors given top rank so that they arrive at informed and intelligent decisions. Originality/value This study is the first to identify economic factors (economic environment and institutional & regulatory environment) as influencers of venture capitalists’ investment decisions. Further, no study in the past has attempted to rank or prioritize factors influencing venture capitalists’ investment decisions; this is the first attempt of the kind.


2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 2755-2777 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Jones ◽  
Jose Vicente Martinez

Using survey data, we analyze institutional investors’ expectations about the future performance of fund managers and the impact of those expectations on asset allocation decisions. We find that institutional investors allocate funds mainly on the basis of fund managers’ past performance and of investment consultants’ recommendations, but not because they extrapolate their expectations from these. This suggests that institutional investors base their investment decisions on the most defensible variables at their disposal and supports the existence of agency considerations in their decision making.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
Gowtham Ramkumar ◽  
S Chitra

In this paper, we seek to identify the factors influencing the investment decision of individual investors. Further, in the existing pandemic situation, which will cover the scope of the VUCA environment, it is important to understand the factors influencing investor’s investment decision. For this purpose, we used exploratory factor analysis to group the factors affecting an investor’s investment decision. Based on the findings, we identified four factors influencing investment preferences and the reliability of these factors are supported by strong statistical measures


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomola Marshal Obamuyi

The study seeks to determine the main factors influencing investment decisions of investors and how these factors are related to the investors’ socio-economic characteristics in the Nigerian Capital Market. The study covers individual investors using convenient sampling method to obtain information from 297 respondents through a modified questionnaire developed by Al-Tamimi (2005). Independent t- test, Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and post hoc tests were employed. The results indicate that the five most influencing factors on investment decisions of investors in Nigeria are past performance of the company’s stock, expected stock split/capital increases/bonus, dividend policy, expected corporate earnings and get-rich-quick. Also, the five least influencing factors include religions, rumors, loyalty to the company’s products/services, opinions of members of the family and expected losses in other investments. The study finds that the socio-economic characteristics of investors (age, gender, marital status and educational qualifications) statistically and significantly influenced the investment decisions of investors in Nigeria. With regard to the past performance of the company’s stock as an assessing factor, groups of investors statistically differed in factor assessment, as segments of a group considered the factor as the most important/unimportant. Since the identified most influencing factors are usually classified as wealth maximising factors, the study recommends that the investment climate and the market environment be made friendly and conducive to attract investors by creatively developing programmes and policies that impact on investors’ decisions in order to maximise the value of the firms and enhance the wealth of the investors. The market players should re-organise the market and implement accommodating policies which will eliminate fraud and resolve the leadership crisis in the market.


2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gert Abraham Lowies ◽  
John Henry Hall ◽  
Christiaan Ernst Cloete

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to determine whether anchoring and adjustment as heuristic-driven bias and herding behaviour influences listed property fund managers in South Africa’s property investment decisions. The study contributes to the understanding of the influence of heuristic-driven bias and herding behaviour on property investment decisions made in a highly volatile environment. Design/methodology/approach – This study is focused on the subject field of behavioural finance and follows a survey-based design. A questionnaire was finalised after completion of the pilot study and was sent via e-mail to fund managers of all South African-based property funds listed on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange. Non-parametric statistical measures were used. Findings – Consistency with other studies suggests that anchoring and adjustment may exist in the decisions made by listed property fund managers. However, fund managers tend to not adjust to new information due to the current socio-political environment in South Africa rather than a lack of understanding of the new information. Practical implications – It is recommended that investors form developed and emerging economies take notice of the highly volatile circumstances in which property fund managers in an emerging economy such as South Africa have to make investment decisions. The probability of missed gains as a result of conservative investment strategies may have an impact on future returns. Originality/value – This study enhanced the understanding of the role that heuristic-driven bias plays in the South African property industry and more importantly, it went some way towards enhancing understanding of behavioural aspects and their influence on property investment decision making in an emerging market.


2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
GORDON L. CLARK ◽  
EMIKO CAERLEWY-SMITH ◽  
JOHN C. MARSHALL

Government-sponsored inquiries into trustee competence, and legislation regarding the protocols and practice of trustee decision making, have raised questions about the competence of trustees to make investment decisions consistent with the long-term interest of defined benefit pension plan beneficiaries. In this paper, we report the results of an analysis of trustee competence in solving problems relevant to their investment responsibilities. Based upon a set of widely recognized problems drawn from the psychology literature, we assess their discount functions, their willingness to risk their own money and others' money, their appreciation of probability, and their use of evidence to solve problems. For comparison, where appropriate we report the results of the same testing regime applied to a group of Oxford undergraduates. Our goals are fourfold: first, to demonstrate the nature of trustee competence in decision making; second, to demonstrate the range of trustee responses to problems relevant to investment; third, to assess trustees' risk appetites in relation to their own and others' money; and fourth, to draw implications from these results for the governance of trustee boards and their relationships with advisers and service providers. It is shown that trustee competence is surprisingly heterogeneous, and the lack of common approaches to problems relevant to investment practice has significant implications for fund governance.


Market Forces ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Muhammad Rehan ◽  
Jahanzaib Alvi ◽  
Lubna Javed ◽  
Baber Saleem

Market irregularities and irrational behavior triggered investor’s changes in the stock market, and this has led to an investigation into the impact of various behavioral biases and factors affecting decision-making for individual investors. The quality of individual investor behavior in making stock investment decisions is very important to be understood as a reference of the movement of the capital market. This study investigated the role of behavioral finance and investor psychology in investment decision-making at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSE). Using a sample of 147 individual investors, the study established that behavioral factors such as Herding, Heuristic, Market and Prospect that affected the decisions of the investors operating at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSE). As there are a few studies in Pakistan related to behavioral finance, so this study mainly contributes to the field of behavioral finance in Pakistan. This study focusses on existing theories of behavioral finance which led to develop the hypothesis. The result of the analysis is that the four variables have greatly influenced the investment decision and return on investment. All behavioral variables have a significant impact on the decision-making process of investors, which led to the acceptance of all assumptions regarding the level of influence of behavioral factors in decision making for individual investors


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-41
Author(s):  
Esther Ikavbo Evbayiro-Osagie ◽  
Michael Ify Chijuka

This study examines Behavioral Factors and Investment Decision Making in the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE). Thus, the research question is what are the psychological factors affecting investment decisions in the Nigerian capital market. A structured questionnaire was used in collecting data and it was able to collect data from 75 investors with the application of a convenient sampling method. Using overconfidence bias, availability bias, conservatism, and herding effect to define the most important behavioral element affecting investment decision making by investors in the Nigerian. Multiple regression analysis was used as the key methodological method for evaluating the research hypothesis, whereas the internal consistency of the questionnaire calculated from Cronbach's alpha on all variables showed values greater than 0.7 with a sufficient level of reliability. The primary beneficiary group would be the buyers on the stock market who would be educated enough about the effect of their own behavioral influences on their stock market decision making. The knowledge would be useful in making optimal investment decisions and avoiding unfavorable decisions to increase their resources. In turn, it will be helpful to policymakers and stock market regulators to help them understand the position of behavioral influences inherited in consumer decision-making and that may be associated with the need for stock market brokers to update their customer's trading practices to a higher level. The findings of this study suggest that overconfidence, availability bias, and herding impact demonstrated a positive significant relationship with NSE investment decision-making except conservatism which showed a negative relationship with investment decision-making but at 0.01 levels statistically significant. On the basis of the results, it can be generalized that the most prevalent factors affecting investor investment decision taking in NSE are overconfidence, availability bias, and herding influence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Imran Ahmed ◽  
Danish Ahmed Siddiqui

This study aims to analyze and investigate the factors influencing returns of Islamic and conventional mutual funds in Pakistan. Furthermore, this study aims to investigate whether macroeconomic and systematic factors affect Shariah compliant Equity, Income and Assets allocation Mutual Funds differently as compared their conventional counterparts. Different statistical techniques like correlation and regression analysis were applied to study their effect. The study concluded that macro-economic factors have an impact on both conventional and Islamic mutual funds however their impact seems to be insignificant at large. Overall funds behaved negatively with discount rate, inflation and GDP, whereas positively with trade and market index. Apart from income funds that were affected positively with discount rate. Furthermore, income funds were not affected by market index.  Moreover, inflation and GDP that is usually backed by higher interest rates, also effects overall returns negatively. There was no significant difference in the behavior among the Islamic and conventional funds with respect to the above-mentioned factors. Lastly, there was high correlation among both the equity and asset allocation based mutual funds (both Islamic and conventional). It was also found that asset allocation funds had close resemblance to equity-based funds as compared to income-based funds in term of factors influencing their returns, which suggested that most of the asset allocation funds have more portion of equity as compared to debt and could be considered high risk. Hence, they seem to be against Modern portfolio theory Markowitz (1952) presuming it to be in a minimum level of risk.  


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