(Yicai Global) March 18 -- The Chinese stock market has nearly 150 million individual investors. Their average age is 37.6 years and those with an investment less than CNY500,000 (USD74,515) each make up 80 percent of all, a survey report issued by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange has revealed.

It is still very common to see individual stock investors make irrational investments, which feature too frequent transactions, the report released late on March 15 showed, saying that investors with several transactions within a week make up 46.4 percent of the total. Those with one or two transactions within one month make up 31.9 percent and those with one transaction in more than one quarter make up the remaining 21.7 percent.

Chinese individual stock investors do not pay attention to halting trading losses, and 45.3 percent of investors seldom employ stop-loss strategies. A stop-loss strategy is an investment method in which the investor sells all his/her stocks when the loss reaches a certain percentage or amount.

In the 2018 investors' risk appetite composition, investors who sought risk aversion made up 43.1 percent, a decrease of 4 percentage points from the previous year, risk-neutral investors took up 32.2 percent, up 3.6 percentage points, and risk-seeking investors amounted to 24.7 percent, which was basically the same as the previous year.

Investors have tended to be prudent in stock investments this year. A total of 37.5 percent of investors are optimistic, down 1.5 percentage points from the previous year; 47 percent are neutral, down 4.1 percentage points; and 15.5 percent are pessimistic, up 5.6 percentage points, the survey said.

The survey was done using a stratified sampling based on the geographical distribution of securities accounts. It was a questionnaire survey of 24,074 investors, aged between 18 to 60 years old in the target areas, who have traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the SZSE in the past 12 months, the SZSE noted, adding that the target areas covered 331 large, medium and small cities in China.