Why Women Investors Won’t Embrace Stocks
Female investors have a cautious view of equities. That is a problem—for women as well as the rest of the finance world.
3 min
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“I think we’re a bit outnumbered, but we’re here.” So said one commenter on a Reddit thread about whether women joined in the recent WallStreetBets trading frenzy.
Female investors largely sat out the riskiest punts taken on stocks like GameStop. That may be no bad thing considering the videogame retailer’s stock is down over 80% from its late-January peak. But low female participation in stock-market investing more generally is a problem, for women and the finance industry alike.
Less than one-quarter of deposits into U.S. brokerage accounts were made by women in January, according to consumer-spending data analytics firm Cardify. Globally, the situation may be even worse: Israel-based brokerage eToro said that female investors make up just 14% of its registered users, most of whom are in the U.S. and Europe.
Some trading platforms did a good job of signing up women during the pandemic. Just over a third of Robinhood users were female at the beginning of this year, up from 20.5% a year before, according to Cardify. For the finance industry as a whole, though, attracting more female custom remains a frustratingly slow work in progress.
Women tend to be more conservative investors than men, preferring to put their wealth into real estate, cash or bonds while steering clear of equities. Credit Suisse surveyed a sample of existing clients and found that almost half of its female customers have 90% of their wealth tied up in low-yielding cash and fixed income—well over double the exposure the Swiss bank recommends.
That kind of caution has downsides, particularly when interest rates are as low as they are today. Since the global financial crisis, cash has returned a paltry 0.6% annually, while 10-year Treasury bills have returned 4.8%, based on Portfolio Visualizer calculations. By comparison, the U.S. stock market has averaged 12% a year.
Governments and companies are increasingly shifting the responsibility for a secure retirement onto individuals, raising the stakes for individuals’ investment decisions. Getting women to increase their exposure to equities is all the more important because they outlive men, so need their pension pots to last longer.
The underlying reasons for women’s caution as investors are complex. They are still paid less than men. Earnings and pension contributions can be disrupted when mothers take time out of the workforce to rear children, hampering their ability to put money aside for the future. Many women prioritize keeping what they have safe instead of investing in better-returning assets that could help offset these pay gaps. The wider issue here is that risk tolerance typically rises with wealth, for both sexes.
The finance industry also has a longstanding image problem with women. For some, investment jargon is the turnoff; for others it is the sometimes patronizing financial products targeted at them.
Warren Buffett once quipped that part of his investing success came from “only competing with half the population.” In reality, few people are benefiting from the status quo. Women are missing out on a share of stock-market spoils. Asset managers are losing out on the higher fees that come from higher-yielding assets. Robinhood needs female customers to maintain its blistering user growth as the startup prepares for a mooted initial public offering.
When they do enter the stock market, women’s investment behaviours often lead to good returns. They tend to think long-term, spread their risk by buying diversified funds and rack up lower fees by trading less frequently than men. That kind of steady capital might help to offset some of the excesses seen in the market this year.
Currently, women’s share of financial assets globally is estimated at 30% by Credit Suisse, or 40% including real assets such as property, which tend to be more evenly distributed. Those numbers should grow as women join the workforce in greater numbers and accept higher-paying jobs. That may automatically improve the situation, as they have more money to invest and can afford to take greater risks with it. Catering to women’s financial needs is likely to become a more competitive business in future.
Yet the finance sector also has a role to play. Robinhood makes much of its mission to “democratise” the industry, and has indeed turned more women’s heads in a matter of months than some traditional brokerages managed in years. With women still heavily outnumbered on even the most accessible apps, though, there is much further to go. Democratising finance needs to include a better pitch to the other 50% of the population.
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Investors are taming impulsive money moves by adding a little friction to financial transactions
4 min
To break the day-trading habit that cost him friendships and sleep, crypto fund manager Thomas Meenink first tried meditation and cycling. They proved no substitute for the high he got scrolling through investing forums, he said.
Instead, he took a digital breath. He installed software that imposed a 20-second delay whenever he tried to open CoinStats or Coinbase.
Twenty seconds might not seem like much, but feels excruciating in smartphone time, he said. As a result, he checks his accounts 60% less.
“I have to consciously make an effort to go look at stuff that I actually want to know instead of scrolling through feeds and endless conversations about stuff that is actually not very useful,” he said.
More people are adding friction to curb all types of impulsive behaviour. App-limiting services such as One Sec and Opal were originally designed to help users cut back on social-media scrolling.
Now, they are being put to personal-finance use by individuals and some banking and investing platforms. On One Sec, the number of customers using the app to add a delay to trading or banking apps more than quintupled between 2021 and 2022. Opal says roughly 5% of its 100,000 active users rely on the app to help spend less time on finance apps, and 22% use it to block shopping apps such as Amazon.com Inc.
Economic researchers and psychologists say introducing friction into more apps can help people act in their own best interests. Whether we are trading or scrolling social media, the impulsive, automatic decision-making parts of our brains tend to win out over our more measured critical thinking when we use our smartphones, said Ankit Kalda, a finance professor at Indiana University who has studied the impact of mobile trading apps on investor behaviour.
His 2021 study tracked the behaviour of investors on different platforms over seven years and found that experienced day traders made more frequent, riskier bets and generated worse returns when using a smartphone than when using a desktop trading tool.
Most financial-technology innovation over the past decade focused on reducing the friction of moving money around to enable faster and more seamless transactions. Apps such as Venmo made it easier to pay the babysitter or split a bill with friends, and digital brokerages such as Robinhood streamlined mobile trading of stocks and crypto.
These innovations often lead customers to trade or buy more to the benefit of investing and finance platforms. But now, some customers are finding ways to slow the process. Meanwhile, some companies are experimenting with ways to create speed bumps to protect users from their own worst instincts.
When investing app Stash launched retirement accounts for customers in 2017, its customer-service representatives were flooded with calls from panicked customers who moved quickly to open up IRAs without understanding there would be penalties for early withdrawals. Stash funded the accounts in milliseconds once a customer opted in, said co-founder Ed Robinson.
So to reduce the number of IRAs funded on impulse, the company added a fake loading page with additional education screens to extend the product’s onboarding process to about 20 seconds. The change led to lower call-centre volume and a higher rate of customers deciding to keep the accounts funded.
“It’s still relatively quick,” Mr. Robinson said, but those extra steps “allow your brain to catch up.”
Some big financial decisions such as applying for a mortgage or saving for retirement can benefit from these speed bumps, according to ReD Associates, a consulting firm that specialises in using anthropological research to inform design of financial products and other services. More companies are starting to realise they can actually improve customer experiences by slowing things down, said Mikkel Krenchel, a partner at the firm.
“This idea of looking for sustainable behaviour, as opposed to just maximal behaviour is probably the mind-set that firms will try to adopt,” he said.
Slowing down processing times can help build trust, said Chianoo Adrian, a managing director at Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America. When the money manager launched its online retirement checkup tool last year, customers were initially unsettled by how fast the website estimated their projected lifetime incomes.
“We got some feedback during our testing that individuals would say ‘Well, how did you know that already? Are you sure you took in all my responses?’ ” she said. The company found that the delay increased credibility with customers, she added.
For others, a delay might not be enough to break undesirable habits.
More people have been seeking treatment for day-trading addictions in recent years, said Lin Sternlicht, co-founder of Family Addiction Specialist, who has seen an increase in cases since the start of the pandemic.
“By the time individuals seek out professional help they are usually experiencing a crisis, and there is often pressure to seek help from a loved one,” she said.
She recommends people who believe they might have a day-trading problem unsubscribe from notifications and emails from related companies and change the color scheme on the trading apps to grayscale, which has been found to make devices less addictive. In extreme cases, people might want to consider deleting apps entirely.
For Perjan Duro, an app developer in Berlin, a 20-second delay wasn’t enough. A few months after he installed One Sec, he went a step further and deleted the app for his retirement account.
“If you don’t have it on your phone, [that] helps you avoid that bad decision,” he said.
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