The Impact of Expertise and Investment Familiarity on Investorsʹ Use of Online Financial Report Information

In this study we use a unique dataset to examine whether professional and nonprofessional investors use different online quarterly financial information when making investment decisions, and whether the online information they use depends on whether they are researching a new investment or evaluating a current investment. Our results suggest that professional investors prefer to view PDF-formatted quarterly reports and tend to rely directly on the financial statements compared with nonprofessional investors who prefer to view HTML-formatted reports and have a tendency to rely more on managementʹs discussion of the quarterʹs results. Our results also suggest that, for nonprofessional investors, investment familiarity (i.e., whether they are evaluating a current investment or researching a new investment) strongly affects the type of financial information they view within a firmʹs quarterly reports. Our results have implications for the design of experimental studies, and provide information useful to managers, financial report users, standard setters, and researchers as they attempt to better understand the types of information that professional and nonprofessional investors use when making investment decisions.