Snap-judgment Trading by Individuals?

Do individual investors trade carefully and cautiously, or do they make snap judgments? In their March 2025 paper entitled “The Research Behavior of Individual Investors”, Toomas Laarits and Jeffrey Wurgler employ browser histories for an approximately representative sample of U.S. individual investors to address:

• How much time do they spend on stock research?
• Which sites do they use?
• On which stocks do they focus?
• How proximate is their research to their trades or to corporate events?
• What types of information do and do not attract their attention?

Using browser and trading histories, with confidential/personal data removed, from 484 volunteer households that make 2,911 individual U.S. stock trades via online brokerage accounts during January, February, March and June of 2007, they find that:

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