Effect of Personality Traits on Investment Intention of People: Kazakhstan Case

The paper aims to study relationship between personality traits (“big five” traits, such as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness), as well as financial literacy of retail investors on willingness to make investment decisions on financial assets in Kazakhstan. Survey collection method of 200 randomly selected people from different social statuses, geographical locations (cities, countryside) and ages via internet, printed papers, and face-to-face meetings. There were decided to approach exploratory study with pragmatic philosophical view. Due to the reason of usage questionnaire, quantitative approach will be the most suitable approach for the study. The research is tended to be completed during the one academic semester. Hence, cross-sectional study is the best fitted type of study for the research paper. Salary, extraversion, agreeableness, preferences on investment instruments and level of financial literacy have statistically significant positive impact on intention of people to participate in investment activities. Conversely, openness trait found to has statistically significant negative impacts on investment intention of participants. Other variables do not have a statistically significant negative or positive impacts on investment willingness within the country. Intention to make investment decisions can be identified by screening of secondary data received from related papers, intention to make risky investments and level of risk tolerance toward investment decisions. However, level of tolerance toward risks varies according to the individuals' level of neuroticism, agreeableness, as well as level of sadness, conscientiousness, and financial literacy.


INTRODUCTION
Republic of Kazakhstan is the one of the recently emerged countries with the communist background, which previously rejected most of the capitalist and democratic visions on making policies and conducting wealth of society. However, thanks to the geopolitical changes in the region and development of good relationship with countries overseas, as well as becoming a member of globalization processes, Kazakhstan started to attract FDIs (foreign direct investments), FPIs (foreign portfolio investments), establish stock markets, such as Kazakhstan stock exchange (hereinafter "KASE"), as well as Astana International Exchange (hereinafter "AIX") and promote the investment activities among legal entities and citizens of the country (zero commission policy for trading via KASE and AIX). Hence, people, theoretically, must become more intelligent, globalized and have opportunities, as well as the desire to make investment decisions by purchasing securities.
Over the past century, the importance of brokerage companies, as well as mutual funds has grown up all over the world, due to the advantages they provide to investors: cheaper investment expertise costs, expertise of professional analytics, and a diversified portfolio. (Alexakis et al., 2004, Spuchľakova et al., 2015. The improvement of brokerage-dealer field of business is also considered as a crucial mark for evaluating the activity of brokerage companies, as well as mutual funds worldwide (Zaremba, 2019). Hence, intention to make investment decisions depends from the growth of brokerage-dealers business and mutual funds improvement within the country. However, personality traits are one of crucial variables that affects on investment intention of people. The connection between human emotions and the risk associated with investments can be confusing and incomprehensible at first glance. Lee and Andrade argue that when investors benefit from past uncertainty, they assume that the past experience of benefiting from uncertainty can be repeated and are willing to take risks, but they are risk averse if they cannot eliminate the uncertainty (2015). For example, a positive attitude and a sense of success can increase an investor's desire to make a risky investment decision (Haase and Silbereisen, 2011). The same results were obtained by Aydemir and Aren (2017), where they found that personal mood and feelings make an impact on risk tolerance from positive side, while basic personal risk aversion toward non-financial decisions negatively impact on risk tolerance. Also, in accordance with Baranczuk, investors  Finally, anger can manifest itself differently in compliant individuals and neurotics (Mill et al., 2018).
Regression analysis made by Sadiq and Khan (2019), serves to the scholars as the proof that personality traits play one of the important roles in investment intention of individuals. The literature was executed in order to examine the effect of five personality traits, such as neuroticism, extroversion conscientiousness agreeableness and intention for practices, on investment willingness of people. As the result, proactive people, well-organized, as well as who have openness for getting new skills traits are more intended to make investment decisions.
Last but not least, investment decisions are depended from different personality traits, among which is risk tolerance (Hoffman and Post, 2017;Chiu and Zhu, 2017). Moreover, the financial literacy, as well as experience and skills of investors play on of the important role in investment decisions (Lusardi, 2019;Jonsson et al., 2017;Cupak et al., 2018;). The obvious but important traits as age and gender impact on risk tolerance and investment willingness to do investments (Isidore and Christie, 2018). In accordance with Annamalah et al., socio-economic characteristics as social status, and level of education impact on investment intention of people to whether make investment decision or not (2019). In simple words, investor-related factors such as, the intensiveness to gather high risks, financial knowledge and literacy, investment experience, age, gender and social status may shift the investment mood toward the decision to purchase, sell or ignore potential investments on financial assets.
The research paper tries to identify the effect of personality traits and its effort to push or hold people for investment decisions. Nevertheless, in order to understand the investment willingness and future potentials of Kazakhstanis, the paper needs to identify the answer on the research question: "What is the relationship between personality traits on investment willingness of people in Republic of Kazakhstan?" By researching the topic, the paper can receive knowledge on investment potentials, as well as determine the investment willingness and future investment trends of Kazakhstanis. Hence, the research has designed three questions that will guide the paper in order to achieve the research goal: How: The study will help audience to understand how the personality traits impact on investment willingness of Kazakhstanis.
Why: The study will help to understand why people are (not-) willing to make investment decisions.
What: The research paper will help to realize what an individual can do to get benefit from the unusual situation in the stock market.
The research paper will be helpful and meaningful for individuals and legal entities who are interested in investment activities. Especially, the research will illustrate the importance of learning personal attitudes and their effect on making the investment decisions on the financial market within or outside of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Investment intention
Investment intention is depended not only by both macro-level factors and industry factors, but also by risk tolerance and the financial literacy of people (Vatamanescu et al., 2016). Moreover, is also impacted by taxes and fees charged for investment activities (Fu et al., 2012), because the government regulation on individuals and legal entities regulations can decrease the net profit from trading securities, in result of which, people's intention to make investment decisions may recess. In accordance with Sirri and Tufano (1998), investment behavior can fluctuate due to the market reaction on emerged news on mutual funds and other brokeragedealers' institutions. It's obvious sense, in which people who hold money and/or willing to invest via hedge funds or investment companies, which reputations were changed due to emerged news, can recess the decision or decide to stop investment activities. The image, age and size of brokerage-dealers' companies also closely correlate with investment intention of people to do investment decisions via those firms (Benson et al., 2008).
The literature determined that a growth in the risk associated with losses of investment instruments usually causes a decrease in the net subscriptions of mutual funds' clients and investors' choice to hold securities in brokerage accounts (Filip, 2020;Sirri and Tufano, 1998 (Barber et al., 2016) and evaluate different types of risks (Spuchľakova et al., 2015) when make investment decisions.

Relationship between Personality traits and Investment Climate
One of the important factors that affects the investment willingness of people on intention to make investments is the investment climate. According to Kulanov et al., the investment climate can be identified by the macroeconomic, sociopolitical, as well as by financial conditions within the state. Such a climate impacts the intention of individuals, legal entities and financial institutions to gather debts, issue bonds and loans, and to acquire shares (to invest) of the companies operating in that state (2020). In other words, the investment climate is the environment that has been created and developed by the individuals and government agencies through issuing policies, procedures, as well as regulations, in order to promote capital movements between lenders to borrowers, whereas financial institutions must serve as intermediaries of such processes, lenders and investors provide funds to borrowers, and debtors attract funds by promising rewards to investors and lenders. Also performance of any country, the governments must to adapt new measurement system in exchange of current GDP. In other words, in order to make investment performance within the country more effective the government should take in to consideration the ecological sustainability, because bad ecological performance may lead to the decrease in average lifetime of people and decrease economic performance every year. Thus, as we know, poor economic performance leads to lowering average investment ranking of local companies and increase in risk level of investments, that consequently, become a result of rare investment activities within the state.

Availability of investment sites and Investment intention
Having proper environment and interest rates regulated by the National bank are some parts of the cornerstone, but having investment sites, which operates in the country and wide access of possible investment instruments, adequate commissions, qualified brokers, analysts and managers, as well as understandable logic of how to invest is another part of the cornerstone, but closely corelates with investment climate role. Such investment sites, usually, can be provided by commercial bank's affiliated companies, mutual funds, stock exchanges and other online trading services, such as FOREX clubs, Tinkoff and etc. Starting from the hub of investment activities and financial buffer of any state, that is regulated and founded by the Governmentstock exchange. As was written at the beginning of the paper, Kazakhstan has only two stock exchanges, that are based in Nur-Sultan city, and called KASE and AIX. The main purpose of stock exchange is in ensuring an available platform for the sale and purchase of securities, that provide confidence to parties of presence of liquidity. However, there is a silver lining. According to Gizitdinov, N., & Griffin, D., the client base of the largest investment bank in Kazakhstan is growing at huge leaps, but the number of services provided is growing not just in a natural market way, but more artificially imposing shares of certain companies in order to increase the personal capitalization of the bank by Freedom Finance and increased benefits for clients supporting such an adventure (2021). In other words, the greater the influence and demand for the investment services of a company, the greater the greed and desire to totalize the market with its presence. As illustrated in Figure 2, the client base is growing rapidly, but the growth of active investors is less, which means that investment companies artificially buff the number of transactions of clients willing to purchase shares of companies in exchange for benefits, which can further undermine the authority of large mutual funds, as well as brokerage companies and lead to a decrease in investment activity within the country.

Financial literacy
According to the literature, financial literacy refers to the knowledge and skills obtained from financial decisions (Brown et al., 2018). In other words, the knowledge and theoretical background, obtained either from study or via practical experience, can help to make proper expertise on investment decisions of people.  (2012), an investor can be more attentive on possible biases and understand that it will impact on personal investment willingness and own decisions related to investments. In the study of Hamza and Arif (2019), explored that financial literacy significantly influence the investment intention of people, by providing them an opportunity to decrease probability of investment failures and losses. Consequently, an investor can avoid any investment mistakes after gathering knowledge and skills of behavioral finance.

Risk Tolerance
Risk tolerance can be explained as a personal perception of risks, associated with certain activities (Sahin and Yilmaz, 2009). In other words, person who is tolerant to some level of risks is willing to behave in risky manner in order to get higher rewards. Consequently, risk tolerance toward investment decisions is the trade-off between the perceived risk and potential rewards on financial instruments (Grable, 2017).

Openness and Investment Intention
Openness is one of the personal traits that pushes people to look at problems and opportunities from a different angle, have independent thoughts, be imaginative, and be open to new skills and knowledge, as well as see non-trivial opportunities (Mohan and Mulla, 2013). People who deprived of openness most likely to have a wide variety of perspectives and thoughts (Schwaba et al., 2018). In accordance with Simmons, this attitude mostly assigned to those people who are want to know as much knowledge as they can and those who have an interest to learn new insights (2011). The another finding related to openness, Kaufman with other academics argue that openness leads to development of personal creativeness (2016). Moreover, individuals who have high level of openness can be the driven force of new ideas (Woods et al., 2018). Due to this feature, investors have an inherent desire to practice new financial instruments and look for benefits in any changes in the financial market. Openness allows investors to make nontraditional financial decisions and allows them to have a positive relationship with risk tolerance and willingness to make investment decisions in the financial market (Nga and Yien, 2013

Conscientiousness and Investment Intention
Conscientiousness refers to the behavioral trait of people who tend to comply with society's standards of norms and laws. People who have this character trait at a high level are able to inspire confidence, be controlled by norms and laws (Bogg and Roberts, 2004). This character trait is divided into achievements and reliability. Achievement describes the desire to be hardworking and conquer new heights. While reliability outlines a person's responsibility to someone or something, as well as diligence before tasks and obligations (Roberts et al., 2005).

Extraversion and Investment Intention
The literatures states that proactive, excitement, optimistic and people who are seeking to be socialized with group of individuals are tended to make investment decisions of own funds in stock markets (McCrae and Costa J., 1997, Mayfield et al., 2008, Leary et al., 2009, Pan and Statman, 2013. Moreover, the scholars found that proactive and excitement seeking individuals more tolerant to the risks. Another researcher has found that proactive, excitement seeking and optimist people, who want to be socialized are more willing to do purchases of uncollateralized debts and financial instruments (Brown & Taylor, 2014). As an additional argument for Brown and Taylor's assumptions, the scholar, Durand, in own observation has identified that investors with high degree of proactiveness, excitement and optimist views are ready to hold high risks in order to get high returns (Durand et al., 2008).

Neuroticism and Investment Intention
According to Kasilingam and Charles, people who have a highly dominated neuroticism personality trait in general, are emotionally unstable, experiences a large amount of pressure, anxious and stress, worries about many different issues, gets upset easily, experiences rapid shifts in emotions and pessimistic and suffer from low confidence level (2014). investor with high level of neuroticism trait tends to make less investment decisions on securities and debt instruments (Oehler et al., 2018). Hence, neuroticism significantly impacts on both and long-term and short-term investment willingness (Lathif, 2019). Consequently, an investor with high level of neuroticism trait prefer to avoid uncertainty related to investment decisions on financial assets and often, overestimate the risks which occurs during economic recessions, but during economic growth, oppositely, underestimate the risks, which obviously leads to future losses on future value of securities.

Agreeableness and Investment Intention
Agreeableness, from the word itself, is associated with a person's desire to have positive connections with other people. This trait is characterized by the desire to be useful to someone or something. In accordance with Graziano et al., a person with a high level of goodwill pursues the desire to be part of society and contribute to a brighter future (2007). Moreover, trust and close cooperation are inherent in this human trait. However, the disadvantages of this trait are dependence on someone or something. This is due to the fact that benevolent individuals try not to disappoint people's expectations, which ultimately reduces the firmness and independence of a person when making any decision (Bernardine et al., 2000). Consequently, benevolence can lead to a dysfunction in the investment activity of an individual, which, in its end, will affect the investment desire of a person. revealed that agreeableness has negative association with risky behavior. Agreeableness has negatively effect on risk tolerance. For the most part, agreeable people are highly dependent on the opinions of others and, due to a weak will to make an independent decision, they resort to the help of financial advisers, who in turn manage the client's investment portfolio as they wish (Pak and Mahmood, 2015).

METHODOLOGY
The research paper examines the effect of individuals' attitudes on willingness to make investment decisions, as well as how the level of financial literacy may affect to the investment of participants), more than 1,000,000 KZT (10% of participants). Other responses will be presented in "Analysis" section.
The total amount of questions in the survey consists of 14 questions, that included multiple choice questions (4), rating scale questions (9), and typing question (1). Note. The Table 1 represents listed variables, their abbreviation and short description.

Variables
The analysis includes one dependent variable (investment intention) and the rest variables, such as gender, age, education, salary, extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, investment instruments, financial literacy, and tolerancy are independent variables.

Hypothesis
The relationships among dependent and autonomous factors were tested using panel data for concomitant causes. For the following reasons, panel data were used to explore relationships between dependent and independent variables. Moreover, the data used to conduct an empirical study of the effect of big 5 personality traits on investment intention, as well as to explore the effect of financial literacy on investment willingness in Kazakhstan. In accordance with Levin, Lin, and Chu (LLC) methods, the results reject the null hypothesis, which means the unit root does not exist in the entire model.
Before running the research analysis, the hypothesis has to be organized in the following way: In order to fulfill the goals of the research, there was devised a model that pitted Investment intention against a series of independent variables that can justify the effect of personality traits and financial literacy on intention to make investment decisions. The model is illustrated below:

FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS
The section illustrates the research findings and analysis undertaken to fulfill the research objectives, answer the research questions and agree or reject the hypothesis.     Note. Table 3 illustrates the correlation between all variables tested in the research.

Correlation analysis
In accordance with the table, investment intention of participants highly correlates with income level (0.7083), preferences toward investment instruments ( Inversely, the Table 3 illustrates highly negative correlations between agreeableness and gender (-0.5893), salary and age (-0.7334), conscientiousness and age (-0.6652), salary and education level (-0.5175), conscientiousness and educations (-0.5602), and neuroticism and salary (-0.5391).  Note. Table 4 illustrates the information related to the panel data statistics.

Panel data (Ordinary list square)
The high R-squared value has been found (0.7581). This appears to be able to explain variations in effects on investment intention of participants. Moreover, the "F" statistics of the model shows the significance of all independent variables. P-value ("P>|t|") can be significant only when it's less than 0.01, 0.05 and/or 0.10. P-value, which less than 0.05 means that the H0 (null hypothesis) should be rejected and the research must rely on the statistical results. Otherwise, coefficient rates between variables and investment intention are statistically insignificant. Hence, the results show that impact on investment intention can be counted as significant by salary, extraversion openness, agreeableness, preferences on investment instruments, as well as level of risk tolerancy variables.
R-squared of the research is equals to 76%, which means that 76% changes in investment intention can be explained by changes in samples' explanatory variables, while the rest 36% can be explained by errors.

Extraversion trait
The The results of the closely related study made by Andreas, Stefan, Florian and Matthias (2017), confirm the fact that extraversion trait positively correlates and impacts on intention to make investment decisions.

Conscientiousness
The correlation of the conscientiousness trait shows a significantly positive value (0.4232) toward the investment intention model.
The results represent the negative impact of this trait on investment intention (-0.055). It may appear due to high tariffs and fees to be paid for investment activities in Kazakhstan, as well as difficulty in following guidelines and rules within the domestic stock exchange laws.
Moreover, in accordance with obtained results, this trait is more predisposed to older participants, who has less willingness to be a part of investors' community.
This finding rejects the H2 hypothesis, which states that conscientiousness positively impacts investment intention. However, due to the fact, that conscientiousness is not statistically significant, the results on this trait are not acceptable.
According to Husnain, Shah and Fatima (2019), conscientiousness positively affects and correlates with investment intention variable, which contradicts the results of this study.

Neuroticism
In accordance with the correlation table, the neuroticism trait has significantly negative correlation with investment intention (-0.3388).
As can be seen in the results, neuroticism has a small positive impact on intention to make investment decisions and investment frequency (0.017). Emotionally instability, large amount of pressure, anxious and stress, worries about many different issues, gets upset easily, rapid shifts in emotions and pessimistic nature most likely pushes people with high neuroticism level to make less investment decisions in the financial market. It can be explained by the way in

Openness
The correlation analysis of the openness trait represents a significantly positive value (0.2178) toward the investment intention model.
As can be seen in the results, extraversion has a significant negative impact on intention to make investment decisions and investment frequency (-0.1228). The results can be explained by the reason, that highly developed openness trait of a person may lead to the highly dominated theoretical exploration of investment field and lack of sufficient time to make expertise of potential investment objects due to spending available time on career development rather than obtainment of new investment knowledge and practical skills. However, despite the explained reasons, H4 hypothesis has been rejected.
The same results were obtained by Muhammad and Raja (2019), when they have tested the hypothesis on openness positive impact on personality traits. The have rejected the hypothesis, as was made in this research.

Agreeableness
The correlation results between the agreeableness variable and investment intention illustrates clients, who will more potentially earn on analysts' advices. H5 hypothesis is rejected due to contradiction in assumptions.
The same analysis obtained by Hamza and Arif (2019) agrees with this research results and state, that agreeableness has positive impact on investment intention.

Financial literacy
The correlation between financial literacy and investment intention model represents one of the highest positive results (0.6687).
As can be explored in the obtained results, financial literacy has significantly positive coefficient with investment willingness (0.2540), that can be explained by personal interest on investment activities, that was learned before. Participants who have knowledge in investment field uses obtained skills and expertise in order to raise more gains from revaluation of securities and decrease losses from failure from investment results. Moreover, the educated people, for the most part, know the methods of hedging and saving money in case of strong market volatility, and also make more accurate financial market forecasts, which allows them to make profitable transactions. Hence, H6 hypothesis has been accepted.
The same results were illustrated in Hamza and Arif study (2019), where the concluded the positive impact of financial literacy on investment intention.

Conclusion
The main goal of this study was to investigate the relationship and impact between personality traits, as well as financial literacy on willingness to make investment decisions in the financial market in Kazakhstan. In this regard, the impacts of extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, financial literacy are analyzed. The data for this research is panel data collected from different random participants of the survey. In order to measure the impact of the independent variables on the investment intention of samples, the regression analysis was executed.
As a conclusion,  The outcomes demonstrate that salary, extraversion, agreeableness, preferences on investment instruments and level of financial literacy have statistically significant positive impact on intention of people to participate in investment activities. Conversely, openness trait found to has statistically significant negative impacts on investment intention of participants. Other variables do not have a statistically significant negative or positive impacts on investment willingness within the country.

Implication and recommendations
The results of the research are expected to provide behavioral understanding of investments' driving forces among individuals and legal entities with realistic evidence on the determinants of forces that pushes or pulls to make investment decisions. Based on the results, the following implications can be listed: -Individuals and legal entities should enhance the proactive, excitement, optimistic view with an intention to seek new opportunities in investment field; -Individuals and legal entities should gather new knowledge, skills and obtain new insights in finance in order to make an appropriate and more effective analysis of financial statements, expertise and economic environment of potential investments to be ready for micro and macro volatilities of the investment objects.

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-Brokerage and investment consultants, as well as analysts should learn and assess the customers' personality traits and encourage them to make investment decisions in accordance with their preferences.

Limitations of the study
The investment intention of people can be evaluated and measured by their frequency of investment activities in the financial market, while personality traits by own feelings and expertise of individuals. Hence, the above-mentioned implications have to be interpreted in light of the limitations. First of all, the study was conducted within one country -Kazakhstan.
The study made in Kazakhstan may contradict to the findings in other states, due to differences