Impact of social media (SM) information on stock market investment decisions (ID): a quantitative investigation using SEM-ANN approach

Social media (SM) platforms have been an essential source of investment-related information. This information influences retail investors' decision-making regarding stock market investment. However, such information is vast, unstructured and mixed. The present study explores specific characteristics and dimensions of social media information that influence investors' decisions significantly in stock market investment. The theoretical framework contains five antecedent variables: Herd Behaviour, Opinion Leadership, Information Trustworthiness, Information Timeliness and Sentiments. It was proposed to investigate how these five variables predict stock market investment decisions (SMID). This study is descriptive, where primary data was used to establish the proposed causal relationships. The data were collected from 341 Indian retail investors whose investments were based on the judgement sampling. The judgement criteria were the size of their portfolio, i.e., 5-50 lakhs. SEM was applied to analyse the data. However, ANN was applied to re-confirm the results. It was found in the study that four out of five variables (except 'Sentiments') influenced the SMID significantly. The findings of this study are useful for financial intermediaries in attracting investors towards stock market investors by giving due consideration to their behaviour on social media.