Abstract:

The theme of our research is relevant because of a boom in private investment markets which are very attractive for the young people to try to beat the market and earn some money. Many scientists have paid attention to this issue. The authors have concluded that there are different factors in achieving a positive financial outcome for investors. The key ones are as follows: the level of financial and investment education, the personal characteristics and behavioral patterns of individuals, the external investment environment.

The main goal of our research is to find out which factors determine the probability to get a positive return for a short-term investment portfolio created by a young inexperienced investor.

The subjects of our research are the results of the Bachelor students’ interactive task in the educational course “Financial markets and financial institutions”. We analyzed the returns of the 273 students’ virtual investment portfolios made in 2023 and 2024.
Moreover, those students were the respondents of the questionnaire on the level of financial and investment literacy, their attitude to risk and some other behavioural patterns. In total, eleven factors have been chosen as the explanatory variables for our econometric model.
Finally, we used the binary logistic regression to assess the probability of getting a positive return on an investment portfolio.

Having the results of the model assessment, we can conclude that individual risk propensity and collective decision-making have a strong influence on the probability of a positive portfolio return. On the other hand, financial knowledge does not have a big significance for the financial result of a young investor.

These findings let us develop some new methodological recommendations for our educational course.

Keywords:

Students, virtual investment portfolio, investment literacy, investments’ behavior, Bachelor’s program.