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Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to measure individual investors’ expectations of risk and return and to evaluate different expectation measures.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors measure individual investors’ expectations of risk and return regarding an index fund and two stocks using survey data on a random sample of individual investors in Sweden. The survey contains three different return and four different risk expectation measures. To evaluate the different expectation measures, three different evaluation perspectives are considered.

Findings

The risk expectations obtained from the different measures are positively correlated across respondents, but their average magnitudes differ considerably across measures. The return expectations are also positively correlated, and their magnitudes also differ, but to a lesser extent. Consequently, the same individual can express risk expectations that either underestimate or overestimate the forward risk, depending on the measure that is used. The variations in the expectations mainly relate to differences in the responses to the questions underlying the different measures, rather than to the methods used to obtain the expectations. The results from the evaluation of the measures indicate that the expectation measure proposed by Dominitz and Manski (2011) is the only measure for which it is possible to distinguish between individuals’ expectations, using all three of the evaluation perspectives.

Originality/value

This is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first paper that evaluates different survey measures of individual investors’ expectations of risk and return.