How Investors Evaluate Stocks

What criteria do individual investors use when deciding which stocks to acquire? In their December 2025 paper entitled “How Investors Pick Stocks: Global Evidence from 1,540 AI-Driven Field Interviews”, Byoung-Hyoun Hwang, Don Noh and Sean Seunghun Shin report the results of 1,540 interviews moderated by artificial intelligence (AI) with actual investors across 10 countries about how they decide which stocks to buy. They partner with CoreData Research to select interviewees, with 280 from the U.S. and 140 each from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and the UK. AI-moderated interviews, initiated by sharing a link to a chatroom, maintain constant interviewer quality with no unwanted variation in personal chemistry. The AI first ask interviewees how they picked stocks in the past and then ask 10 to 15 follow-up questions to determine decision factors. Average interview is 23 minutes. The authors then: (1) conduct an AI textual analysis of each interview transcript, tracing investor reasoning from beliefs and preferences to buy decision; and, (2) compare results across investors to identify common decision factors. Based on results from 1,540 investor interviews, they find that:

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