Six Minutes?! Study Finds That Investors Often Skip Proper Stock Research

There isn’t much research on how individual investors actually research stocks. A big reason for this is the difficulty of tracking what individual investors look at. This is what makes a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) interesting. Researchers used browser data from 484 individual investors to see how they analyzed stocks.

The headline takeaway from the study is striking: The median investor spends just six minutes researching each stock they trade. I’ve often waited longer for my Starbucks order. Most of this research occurs right before hitting the buy button.