UK Investors After 9/11
Attitudes among shareholders in the UK remains buoyant, with three in every four investors (76%) committed to investing in shares in the long term. Research by MORI among UK private investors was for the ProShare 'Private Share Ownership in Britain 2002' survey, sponsored by Computershare.
Undertaken annually for the past four years, the survey is an in-depth analysis that illustrates the year-on-year trends of private investor attitude and behaviour. This year's survey is also an indicator of how the terrorists attacks in America have affected investment, as last year's research was completed just two days before September 11.
Other results from the survey show:
- One in five investors (21%) feel they will always be more cautious in their attitude to investment in the future.
- While two thirds (67%) of private investors believe their underlying portfolio value has fallen in the last year, when asked to estimate the current value of their portfolio the median value has increased slightly to just over £5,500.
- There has been a significant impact from corporate accounting scandals as two thirds (62%) of UK private investors are now less trusting of all company reports and accounts.
- Exposure to the share market today is increasingly coming from employee share schemes (17% of shareholders say they initially came to shareholding via employee share schemes, although demutalisation (26%) and privatisation (25%) continue to the dominant introductions to shareholding).
- The private investor is seeking less information on companies perhaps in an attempt to avoid bad news and also because of fewer purchases. For example fewer shareholders are consulting family/friends (19% compared with 35% in 2001), TV programmes (16% compared with 25% in 2001) and company's own information (14% compared with 30% in 2001).
- Trading activity remains low with an average of 3.2 trades per investor per year (compared with a high of 5.2 in 2000). Shareholders are selling on fewer occasions than they did last year and increasingly cite market turmoil and crashes (from 22% in 2001 to 31% in 2002) rather than price (only increasing from 24% to 27% this year) or not needing the money (falling from 34% last year to 26% in 2002) as the main reason for not selling their shares.
Technical details
* MORI conducted 1008 telephone interviews amongst shareholders between 25 July and 7 August 2002. The sample was fully representative of the shareholding population of Great Britain by gender, age and social grade.
