October the 10th, 2023 – While making money is of course the aim, it appears that Croatian investors – be they experienced or not – prefer security over revenue.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Ana Blaskovic writes, when it comes to earnings and investment security, two categories of investment that are usually inversely proportional to each other, Croatian investors have no doubts: security comes first, and as many as a third of them would seek to properly protect themselves from inflationary pressures on the financial market.
The aforementioned information was garnered by a survey carried out by the Croatian Financial Market Supervisory Agency (Hanfa). It was conducted on the occasion of World Investor Week, which was being marked until October the 8th this year.
“The results of the random sample showed that among the respondents there is still a smaller part of those Croatian investors who are more ready to take higher risks for the sake of quick earnings. These are the type who think only about making quick profit, without taking potential losses into account,” Hanfa’s statement on the matter pointed out.
Most of those surveyed lacked in experience
Almost half of the respondents in the survey declared that they had previously invested in the financial market. Around 40.9 percent of them had significant experience, and 9.4 percent have “some”. The rest have no investment experience whatsoever.
As many as 42.5 percent of those surveyed assessed their knowledge of the financial market as being poor, 48.8 percent as decent and 8.7 percent as excellent. Hanfa’s survey revealed that inflation has prompted not only Croatian investors but people in general to begin really thinking about protecting the value of their assets, opening the door to the option of possible investment in the financial market.
As such, 32.7 percent of them stated that they plan to try to protect themselves from inflation by investing, 34.1 percent haven’t invested so far, but have started thinking about it because of inflation. The same number of them don’t think about investing at all, regardless of inflation. Of those who would choose to invest, the majority (61.4 percent) said they would invest in shares and investment funds, 23.6 percent would invest in bonds, and 15 percent would choose cryptocurrency assets.
Earnings in the short term
A solid majority, 44.4 percent of those surveyed, revealed that the most important thing for them is to be offered some guarantee of minimum security when investing. A smaller part, 28.6 percent of them, declared that they would rely on a good financial advisor when considering the investment of their money. The survey also revealed that 27 percent are primarily thinking about how to make a good profit in the short term.
At the same time, half would-be Croatian investors in the financial market would pay equal attention to potential profit and potential losses. The remaining, almost equal number of respondents, would focus primarily on profit (26 percent) and to those who are most concerned about loss, and profit itself is less important to them (24.4 percent).
When asked whether they consider investing in high-risk assets only in order to achieve high profits in the short term, the majority (56.8 percent) answered negatively.
A quarter of the respondents weren’t sure, and a smaller sum of them (18.4 percent) answered yes. This is also in line with the answers to the question of whether they would be happy to choose an investment that carries lower but certain returns, rather than one that carries high but less certain returns, they noted from Hanfa.
Only 15.6 percent of respondents said that they would prefer high and less secure yields, while 52.3 percent of respondents answered in favour of security. A third were undecided.
