Small investors and listed companies: trust, transparency, controls (2004)

Italians – small investors in the stock market – are now showing a marked unwillingness to buy Italian shares and bonds, in a climate of generalised mistrust in the stock market. The consequences of this lack of confidence are having an impact above all on investment decisions and on the prospects for expanding the production capacity of companies which, are strongly penalised in the possibility of accessing external financing in a phase of strong rationing of bank credit. Italian shares are the first to suffer from this crisis of confidence. So much so that small investors are showing a marked decline in their purchase orientation: from 65.1% (the current percentage of presence in their portfolios), their future orientation has fallen to 44%. The proportion of those who exclude the purchase of shares is growing sharply, rising from 19.1% to 32.2%. This is the picture that emerges from the Eurispes-GSCProxitalia Report titled: Small investors and listed companies: trust, transparency, controls. The analysis aims to measure the needs, expectations and degree of satisfaction- or rather dissatisfaction- of Italian savers, in order to assess what the mood and needs of those who invest a component of their savings in shares or bonds really are today. In particular, the survey was carried out on a sample of 1,000 small investors who had made equity investments in the last five years, broadly representative of the retail component on a national scale.