Financial Literacy: Self-Evaluation and Reality

This study is on the topic of financial literacy, with the data source containing information on clients' demographic information and self-evaluation, change in account value, and trade record, three major problems were investigated: first, whether a client's demographic traits are related to his/her self-evaluation of financial knowledge level; second, does the trading behaviour differ for clients who self-identified as in different financial knowledge groups; and third, do people who self-identified as financially knowledgeable have better investment result. Data manipulation was done using SQL and R. Exploratory analysis including multiple types of plots and proportion tables was used to derive the hypothesis of the potential relationship between variables, and hypothesis tests, contingency tables were used to prove the significance of the relationship. It is observed that demographic traits including marital status, gender, maximum age attained, the residence of living, income and net worth are related to a client's evaluation of his/her financial knowledge level, but the relationship was not strong enough to make predictions based on available information. Investors who think of themselves as more financially knowledgeable tend to choose a more risky portfolio, and they trade more frequently with a clear preference for agent operations -- this type of trade is also commonly used for the group of investors who believe that they lack enough knowledge in this field; while investors in between prefer principal operations. For the actual investment performance, investors who self-identified as equipped with more financial knowledge do have better performance on average, with the internal rate of return used as the standard of evaluation, it is also observed that the investors who see themselves as having an excellent amount of financial knowledge also have the largest diversity in terms of their performance.