Who’s better at investing? Men or women? In the traditional 1950s American household, the man was assumed to be better.
Well, you know how accurate assumptions are.
According to an analysis released today by Fidelity Investments of 8 million customer accounts, the answer is women. This is despite a number of major hurdles facing female investors like the gender pay gap, life events interrupting their career, and even their own overwhelming perception that men are better investors.
Here’s a closer look at the details of Fidelity’s remarkable analysis, the obstacles facing female investors and the traits that ultimately enable women to earn higher returns.
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The findings. Fidelity’s findings were pretty remarkable across the board. There were two main discoveries: Women earn higher returns on their investments, and they also save more. They also do all of this while trading far less than men do.
Across the 8 million customer accounts Fidelity examined, it found that women earned 40 basis points more, or 0.4 percent, than men did in the 2016 calendar year.
A similar large-scale examination of 14 million workplace retirement accounts showed women also outsaved men by 40 basis points, putting 9 percent of their paychecks aside to men’s 8.6 percent.
While neither statistic sounds too noteworthy, a combination of slightly higher savings rates and rates of return add up big over time. Using the savings rates above — and assuming annual returns of 6 percent and 6.4 percent for men and women, respectively — a man who starts saving and investing at 22 on a $50,000 salary will have a nest egg that’s $276,170 smaller than his female counterpart by age 67.
These findings aren’t an anomaly either, according to Sallie Krawcheck, a veteran of the financial industry and CEO of Ellevest, a digital investing platform for women.
“We’ve seen research that indicates this at the hedge fund level, the mutual fund level and the individual investor level,” Krawcheck says, referencing women’s tendency to outperform.
Obstacles facing women. While women may routinely outperform men when they do invest, there are a number of challenges women face that cause them to ultimately end up with a smaller retirement nest egg than men.
Besides the gender pay gap, women take more career breaks than men, which compounds the pay disadvantage.
And then there are the psychological handicaps.
“Women tell us that investing feels unapproachable to them,” Krawcheck says. “They have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest and they don’t feel that they’re well-represented amongst financial advisors, so they don’t see themselves across the desk.”
Even the language and symbols of Wall Street tend to be geared entirely toward men, Krawcheck says: sports and war analogies abound, and the stock market’s animal of choice is a raging bull.
Despite these many hurdles, Fidelity’s findings speak for themselves: When women do invest, they earn better returns than men.
And yet women’s confidence in their own abilities remains shockingly low; Fidelity cites survey results from January showing that just 9 percent of women believe they make better investors than men.
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Insofar as this prevents women from investing early and often, this is yet another obstacle female investors face.
What makes women better investors? On the other hand, this exaggerated sense of humility may be one of the factors making women so effective as investors.
Would someone less confident about their investing skills take more risks or less?
“We actually tend to take less risk. When we do invest, we tend to take the right amount of risk,” says Alexandra Taussig, senior vice president for marketing and business strategy at Fidelity. “Women tend to take a longer-term view and be more goal-oriented as well.”
What about patience?
“We trade in and out less because we know we’re going for the long term, as opposed to worrying about the short term,” Taussig says. The numbers back that narrative up completely.
Fidelity’s analysis found that men were 35 percent more likely to trade than women. “Furthermore, men who trade made an average of 55 percent more trades in 2016 than their female counterparts,” Fidelity reports.
This tendency to trade less frequently is likely a key reason why women investors do better. After all, trading costs drag down returns. Plus, the short-term capital gains tax on an investment is equivalent to your income tax rate, not the far-more-favorable 15 percent long-term capital gains rate. So trading in and out of stocks quickly penalizes men twice.
Time to regain confidence. These results should empower women to believe in themselves and take control of their own investing destiny.
To any women who may be afraid to start investing, Krawcheck has some simple words of advice: “Just get started.”
“Start with a small percent of your paycheck, work your way up, and then if the market goes down? Guess what? You’re investing two weeks later and you’re buying at a lower price,” Krawcheck says.
So while women’s more risk-averse nature may play a role in their investing success, if it keeps them from diving headfirst into investing, that’s when it becomes destructive. There’s no logical reason only 9 percent of women should feel they can outperform men.
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And as for the antiquated 1950s notion that men are better at investing? Well, let’s just say that maybe the default handler of financial matters should’ve been women all along.
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Despite Setbacks, Women Investors Outperform Men originally appeared on usnews.com
