Adoption of On-line Trading in the Hong Kong Financial Market

The purpose of this research is to study what issues may affect investor adoption of on-line trading in the Hong Kong financial market. The studied system is a system that provides straight-through trading for investors, rather than an order routing system that forwards orders from a broker firm to the appropriate market. One communication infrastructure for on-line trading is the Internet. However, other infrastructures, such as wireless communication channels, may also be used to support direct interaction between the investors and the stock exchange. Feasibility of changing to a new service or system can be viewed from different perspectives, technical, operational, financial, and social/organizational. This paper focuses on the social/organizational perspective by using a research model based on the Decomposed Version Theory of Planned Behavior (DTPB) to identify the factors that affect investors’ adoption of on-line trading. A correlation analysis has been performed to investigate whether the hypothesized attributes, variables, and belief structure are correlated with each other. After such analysis, the factors that influence the adoption of the proposed system have been identified, as well as the relationships between the factors. Such results can be helpful to the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (SEHK) and the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) for planning the launch of Internet trading.