%0 Journal Article %A Tobias Lauter %A Marcel Prokopczuk %A Stefan Trück %T Conscientiousness and Performance: The Influence of Personality on Investment Decisions %D 2023 %R 10.3905/jwm.2023.1.199 %J The Journal of Wealth Management %P jwm.2023.1.199 %X We extract proxies for trader conscientiousness from plain text to explain the cross-section of individual and institutional trader performance. The literature claims conscientiousness to be a main determinant of workplace performance. We employ measures like text length, error frequency, sentence simplicity, and lexical diversity to construct a conscientiousness index. Our findings suggest that more conscientious traders outperform their peers on a risk-adjusted basis. This implies that personality affects investment decisions. Our data stems from a web-based platform that gives individuals the opportunity to set up small investment funds other users can invest in. %U https://jwm.pm-research.com/content/iijwealthmgmt/early/2023/01/19/jwm.2023.1.199.full.pdf