经济衰退 女性投资者显优势?

Would the world be in this financial mess if it had been Lehman Sisters?

Earlier this week we talked about how the recession has been tougher on male workers than females. Now, it seems, men's investment portfolios may have taken a bigger hit too.

Based on a two-year study of 2.7 million people with retirement funds at Vanguard, the mutual-fund company, men were 10% more likely than women to cash out of the stock market altogether during the worst, most turbulent times. Women were more likely to stay the course, avoiding radical changes in their holdings.

Men tend to trade more actively than women as a result of greater overconfidence in their ability to make good investment decisions, the Vanguard study says. 'There's been a lot of academic research suggesting that men think they know what they're doing, even when they really don't know what they're doing,' a Vanguard researcher told the New York Times. Overconfident investors tend to feel they are able to make decisions they aren't qualified to make, or lack enough information to support.

Men also are more likely to hold self-directed investment accounts, says a study by Charles Schwab, which allow them to trade more freely than other kinds of accounts.

Women, on the other hand, seem more likely to admit what they don't know, such as the direction of the stock market. And because they tend to trade less than men, they pay fewer commissions. This has been interpreted as under-confidence in the past, but at the moment it looks pretty smart.

On the downside, women tend to put more of their portfolios into bonds and money market funds, curbing returns in a bull market.

I have seen this pattern in my own household. My kids' dad (also my ex-husband and close friend) has long been the more aggressive investor, and for most of the past 20 years he has reaped better returns in the stock market than I. But before and during this recession, my more cautious investment style paid off. Before the recession began, I had sold stock in our son's college fund gradually, in stages, a conservative strategy he didn't endorse, but that wound up protecting the fund from steep losses later. I can't take credit; the discount brokerage firm I use recommended the strategy.