Visualizing levels of self-declared risk aversion

In this paper we analyze a questionnaire, aimed to evaluate the investors’ risk profile. The questionnaire focuses on the following fundamental aspects: investor’s knowledge and financial experience; financial objectives; personal predisposition to risk/earn; temporal horizon. The procedure, a pure descriptive statistical analysis which does not involve any model assumption, consists in a visualization of the dataset, provided by the new VOS method, and it is based on similarity measures between the individuals’ response patterns. From the resulting graphical representations it is possible to analyze the financial preferences of the respondent individuals detecting, for instance, those who give unacceptable responses, those who are disposed to risk, and those who are completely risk-adverse.