Paper short abstract:

Author propose to analyze amateur investing as passion. After explaining this concept, three areas connected to investing will be presented: earmarking of invested money, investing in the context of interaction with others and tackling with social labelling.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the set of in-depth interviews with Polish amateur retail investors and observations of events for them, the author propose to perceive retail investing not only as financial entrepreurial action but also as a passion. Proposed concept of investing as a passion cannot be reduced to the behavioural finance's thrill-seeking hypothesis nor to the sociological notion of edgework, although the latter is employed by author as part of retail investor's action explanation.

This presentation will focus on three aspects of investing - earmarking of invested money, investing in the context of interaction with others and tackling with social labelling. Money for investing are often earmarked as separate from the savings and labelled as private. These monies can be explicitly perceived as cost of their interest by investors. Investing as a passion is also a topic of daily conversations and can contribute to building social networks. Simultaneously investors tend to overstate their financial results and in case of severe loses investor finds it difficult to find support in their peer group. Some investors, especially those investing on markets with less legitimization, can tackle with the problem of being labelled as deviant by their family and friends. In this case they employ defensive strategies similar to the strategies of other passionate hobbyst in order to be perceived as 'normal'.

Nevertheless, it should be stated that amateur retail investing cannot be analyzed only as a passion, without the context of investor's financial results and expectations.