An increasing body of literature is documenting a high pay off from human capital investment. However,
different studies of the interest from capital market actors to take information about intangibles into account
reveal contradictory findings. The interest with respect to intellectual capital indicators is ambivalent. Why? In
the present article five reasons to this ambivalent interest are discussed; Capital market actors may; (1) not
understand the importance of intangibles (the knowledge problem); (2) not trust the indicators with respect to
validity and reliability (the uncertainty problem); (3) exaggerate the risk of loosing the intangible resource (the
ownership problem); and (4) not feel secure about the management's capability of taking action upon data (the
management problem). However, the most important deterrent to account for is may be (5) the mentality of
capital market actors as a group.