Conscientiousness and Performance: The Influence of Personality on Investment Decisions

We extract proxies for trader conscientiousness from plain text to explain the cross-section of individual and institutional trader performance. The literature claims conscientiousness to be a main determinant of workplace performance. We employ measures like text length, error frequency, sentence simplicity, and lexical diversity to construct a conscientiousness index. Our findings suggest that more conscientious traders outperform their peers on a risk-adjusted basis. This implies that personality affects investment decisions. Our data stems from a web-based platform that gives individuals the opportunity to set up small investment funds other users can invest in.