Women are Better Investors than Men

One of my readers asked me about this topic. A few years ago, there was an academic report that showed that women are better investors than men. The key difference wasn’t stock-picking, but risk and trading. Men traded their accounts 45% more than women, and single men traded 67% more than single women. Investing is one of the key activities where doing nothing is often the best move to make.

A study of more than 35,000 discount-brokerage customers by economists at the University of California at Davis found that between 1991 and 1997, women’s portfolios earned, on average, 1.4 percentage points more a year than men’s.
Among single people, the difference was even more pronounced, with single women earning 2.3 percentage points more per year than single men.
Records of investment clubs reveal an even wider performance gap: Through the end of 1998, all-female clubs had an average compounded lifetime return of 23.8 percent a year, compared with just 19.2 percent for all-male clubs, according to the National Association of Investors Corp., which represents about 37,000 clubs nationwide.

Posted by on October 11th, 2005 at 1:39 pm


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