Abstract

The aim of this study was to understand and interpret the phenomenon of behavioral biases of individual investors in investment decisions making. These behavioral biases cause irrationality in investment decision making which results in huge losses. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to analyze the data to explore and understand investors’ immediate experience of this phenomenon. Four individual investors were selected as participants for semi-structured in-depth interviews by using the snowball sampling technique. The transcription of interviews from participants was done by using the verbatim approach. Then analysis was conducted by following four steps of IPA. Three categories of themes emerged such as (a) Feelings and emotions (b) Information availability and analysis, and (c) Psychological motives. It emerged from this study that few of the biases come from the emotional perspective and others from a logical perspective. The study suggests that a strong relationship exists between behavioral biases and investor’s sense of satisfaction with regard to financial investment planning which was found as the investor’s tendency of heuristics. This study contributes to the existing literature by considering investor behavioral biases as a phenomenon.