CONSEGUENZE DELL'EMERGENZA COVID-19 SUI CLIENTI RETAIL DEL SISTEMA BANCARIO ITALIANO: ANALISI CRITICA DEL COMPORTAMENTO DEGLI INVESTITORI E DEL REGOLAMENTO MIFID II

This Paper is aimed at analysing how the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic and its developments have influenced Financial Markets worldwide and, in particular, the investment portfolios of Italian Retail Customers, who passively dealt with the financial crisis. Namely, the dynamics behind such an erosion of wealth have been investigated, starting from the explanation of how the sadly-known Sanitary crisis has given origin to a huge Economic and Financial one. Moreover, some considerations about investors’ behaviour after financial losses have been presented, underlying that, contrarily to what the Theory states, investors are not rational and in some cases their choices negatively affect their investments outcome even more. As a further point, this Study also contains a critical point of view about some aspects of the MIFID II Directive, particularly referring to the Suitability Assessment process, that will be explained throughout this work. The analysis has been carried out in order to be a step-by-step discovery process in the complex world of Finance and in one of its branches, namely, the Behavioural Finance. It has been thought in order to be easily understandable also by those ones whose financial literacy is moderate or even low, with the purpose of clarifying the dynamics behind a complex situation like the economic and financial crisis the World is facing and to highlight common behavioural errors of investors. The focus is on the first period of the Covid-19 outbreak and the immediate following months, the subjects under analysis are Retail Investors and the geographical area considered is Italy.