Mobile Apps, Trading Behaviors, and Portfolio Performance: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in China

Abstract

Mobile Apps, Trading Behaviors, and Portfolio Performance: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in China How do mobile apps influence individual investors’ financial decisions and performance? This study answers this timely and important question by using rare archival data from a large securities company in China using a sample of 20,665 investors. Authors find that mobile app adoption does not affect investors’ portfolio performance when one examines aggregate impacts using a binary indicator of mobile app use. Their additional analyses suggest that adopting mobile apps results in a noticeable decrease in time constraints, a proxy for transaction friction, and a modest increase in trend-chasing bias, reflecting tendencies toward myopic decision making. Because the reduction in time constraints can benefit investors’ performance, the increase in trend chasing can be detrimental to investors’ performance, these findings explain why mobile app adoption has no overall effect on portfolio performance. Further analyses of adopters’ postadoption behaviors provide interesting insights and show that the mobile app usage intensity has an inverted U–shaped relationship with portfolio performance. The results are robust to using different samples or excluding high market volatility periods and by using a variety of methods, such as propensity score matching, dynamic matching, stacked difference-in-differences, or an instrumental variable approach.