Özet:

Cryptocurrencies, which are rising and trending all over the world, show themselves as one of the important investment tools in financial markets. Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a new asset class in recent years, attracting the attention of investors, companies, consumers and, as can be seen from recent literature, academia. Cryptocurrency, the first tool to emerge with blockchain technology, always surpasses the popularity of other fields (e.g. security) and sectors (e.g. banks) where blockchain technology is used or other assets created using this technology (e.g. NFT). Investors are taking more and more part in the cryptocurrency market day by day, despite their lack of knowledge about crypto money, the investment not being protected by the authority, the lack of legal regulation, not knowing where and who the exit point is, and similar uncertainties. The rapid development of technology and the fact that all individuals have easy access to technology, the gaining power of social media and people being exposed to information pollution without questioning the source of the information, the rapid spread of unverified data colloquially called “hearsay” in social media within seconds, crypto currencies are becoming a popular investment tool made possible. Cryptocurrencies pose a major challenge to the field of behavioral finance as they are innovative and rapidly rising financial assets. Because there are fundamental differences in how the cryptocurrency market works and in the architecture of cryptocurrencies. First of all, crypto money is not legal in most countries, including our country, and the so-called cryptocurrency market does not have a legal assurance mechanism. Although this situation does not pose a problem for investors of crypto money, which emerged as a reaction to the central authority, failure to audit the compliance of the exchanges existing in the cryptocurrency ecosystem with legal regulations automatically increases the risk of investment. At this point, the study was designed considering that investors in the cryptocurrency market do not act rationally due to the characteristics of this market and are affected by behavioral factors. As it is known, traditional finance theory argues that investor behavior does not affect the prices of assets and states that investors act rationally. Behavioral finance theory, on the other hand, argues that investors' investment decisions are affected by a wide variety of behavioral factors and that individuals do not act rationally in their investment decisions. So, in what direction do cryptocurrency market investors make decisions? Studies investigating the motivation to invest in cryptocurrencies and the different reasons that push them to invest are insufficient in the literature. For this reason, this study focuses on individual investors in Turkey investing in the cryptocurrency market by investigating the impact of behavioral finance factors on investment decisions in the cryptocurrency market. In this study, a survey form consisting of various scales was prepared and applied to cryptocurrency investors in Turkey in order to examine which behavioral factors influence the investments of individual investors trading in the cryptocurrency markets. The data obtained were tested using Independent Sample t-test, and One Way ANOVA analysis through a statistical analysis program. According to the findings of this study conducted using a quantitative approach; It has been found that investors' cryptocurrency investment preferences are affected by behavioral tendencies. Tendencies with higher averages are "behaving overly optimistically", "avoiding regret", "avoiding uncertainty" and "heuristic factors". According to these results, it can be said that participants approach the cryptocurrency market more optimistically than other financial markets. It can also be stated that participants tend to have high rates of regret and avoidance of uncertainty. When participants make a profit from cryptocurrency, they remove it from the portfolio; When they lose money from crypto money, they do not invest in it again. In addition, it can be said that participants relied on their previous experiences in the market and acted heuristic for their next cryptocurrency investment.

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