Introduction

Over the past several decades, studies of financial theories and research were developed in order to establish a better understanding of the financial markets through using models which describe investors as "rational". Such description indicates that there are usually risk and return tradeoff in all types of financial decisions especially the stock investment decisions. Quite a few financial theories assumed that investors face little difficulty in making decisions in stocks' investment because they are well-informed, careful and consistent. Among the most important financial theories were two theories: Modern Portfolio Theory and Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) which revealed that investors were not confused by the way they get information which was not controlled by their behavioral finance factors. However, the results of applied studies in the developed global capital markets found that many phenomena regarding the stock investment decisions cannot be explained. Meanwhile, behavioral finance had been growing specifically because of the fact that investors rarely behave according to the assumptions suggested in these financial theories.

The domain of behavioral finance seeks to better understand and explain how stock investment decision-making was influenced by financial behavioral factors, as better understanding of these factors helps the investors to select a better stock investment decisionmaking policy.

This research main aim is to verify the important factors that may affect stock investment decision-making at Amman Stock Exchange (ASE), where the applied research results had differed in identifying any of those factors as the most influential on stock investment decisionmaking. Several studies pointed out to the following factors: overconfidence (over-estimate investors' knowledge, under-estimate risks, and overstress their ability to control events), risk perception (individual's assessment of the inherent risk in a given situational problem, herding (following the trend), and loss aversion (avoiding losses is more important than acquiring gains).

Investors in capital asset exchanges, typically take many different and important decisions, the most common are taking investment decisions in order to maximize their wealth; whereas other investors are involved in considering market timing techniques to maximize their wealth. On the contrary, some investors are more risk averters as they follow stocks that have low risk levels; other investors deal with high risk stocks but apply some diversification techniques to control the haphazard risks. Therefore, this research seeks to investigate whether these related variables in investor decision-making process will be affected by behavioral financial factors at ASE.