Despite the flawed market structure of and occasional corruption of wall street, trading is the closest thing to a purely meritocratic activity that I'm aware of. Orders in the market have no skin color. Yes, institutions have advantages, but small accounts have other advantages. Barriers to entry while not trivial, are lower than a lot of industries.
Trading success isn't biased against skin color. But trading success is biased against black (african) genetics. I am pretty sure of that. In the same way black people have genetic advantages over non blacks for many sports. And they win. There are always exceptional outliers.. But black people in general didn't win the genetic lottery when it comes to trading. I would guess the Jews won that lottery. Same for women. I would guess female genetics makes them more emotional and less risk seeking than men. And those are definite disadvantages when it comes to trading. Again this is a general observation, many women will still be great traders, just nowhere near in the numbers that men are.
Genetics play a role but it is not the whole picture. Jewish people have been historically overrepresented in finance mostly because things were a lot less meritocratic in the past than they are today. Going back far enough in history and Christians were not able to charge interest and thus could not be involved in banking. It used to be the case that you needed to physically be inside the stock exchange to really know what was going on. Needless to say very few had this opportunity unless they were born in the right cities to the right parents. In recent decades, online access to information and direct trading has greatly leveled the playing field and this trend should continue. Regarding women and trading, being risk averse is actually an asset in trading. Risk management is key to success and taking too much risk or not even caring to understand risk is a big reason why traders fail. The reason that there are fewer women in trading is the same reason there are fewer women in engineering, computer science, etc. Women are more interested in people and men are more interested in systems. In addition to the interest factor, men also have more incentive to work in high earning or high status fields, because status and earning power are sexual selection factors for men but not for women.
I was thinking more about self made Traders in the last fifty years, Jewish over representation in books like Market Wizards. I just googled Jim Simons religion just now, and it also came back Jewish. I just remembered George Soros as well.
So it was as meritocratic 50 years ago as today? If the top fund managers under 35yo today have the same overrepresentation you might have a point but I doubt it (have not seen this data tho would be interesting)
Here's an interesting article for those who think men make better traders than women. https://vantagepointtrading.com/whats-the-day-trading-success-rate-the-thorough-answer/
I think it does the opposite for Warren Buffet. When he adds to a position, people sit up and take notice...Pension funds may buy or add to what he is buying (Apple, OXY).