Jim Cramer's wife traded on semi-inside information.. her trading style would land her in jail these days. Her style was to send millions of dollars in trading commissions to major wire houses like Morgan Stanley in exchange for inside 'tips'. These tips would be when coverage is being initiated or changed on an issue, or information from analysts before reports are released to the public. There was a great link on ET a while back that lead to a website that went over this. Very interesting then, but unfortuantely illegal today. I wouldn't exactly classify her as a trader.
I would ... I've been treated to many a drink at some east side night club by some guy who got scorching hot tips from his buddy at GS, and he had the nerve to complain because all of the calls didn't work out as expected. :eek: So that's another reason why there aren't as many female traders ... it's to some degreee still a boys club.
I meet every 2nd week with a group of traders, and there is only one woman. She's doing very well, though!
Men and women think differently. (Because of this, men in general, are better at certain things than women. Men also like to do certain things more than women, and are therefore drawn to trading, or whatever.) Whether this is caused x% by the differences in a given brain structure, and/or how it is used is not certain to me. The excerpts below are from a multiple-page article that is quite informative. -Stephen =========================================== Among other things, these investigators found that parts of the frontal cortex, the seat of many higher cognitive functions, are bulkier in women than in men, as are parts of the limbic cortex, which is involved in emotional responses. In men, on the other hand, parts of the parietal cortex, which is involved in space perception, are bigger than in women, as is the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that responds to emotionally arousing information--to anything that gets the heart pumping and the adrenaline flowing. Another brain region now known to diverge in the sexes anatomically and in its response to stress is the hippocampus, a structure crucial for memory storage and for spatial mapping of the physical environment. Imaging consistently demonstrates that the hippocampus is larger in women than in men. These anatomical differences might well relate somehow to differences in the way males and females navigate. Many studies suggest that men are more likely to navigate by estimating distance in space and orientation ("dead reckoning"), whereas women are more likely to navigate by monitoring landmarks. ptsd is not the only psychological disturbance that appears to play out differently in women and men. A PET study by Mirko Diksic and his colleagues at McGill University showed that serotonin production was a remarkable 52 percent higher on average in men than in women, which might help clarify why women are more prone to depression--a disorder commonly treated with drugs that boost the concentration of serotonin. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=his-brain-her-brain
This leads back to the generalization that females are right brained and males left brained. The methodologies I use for trading are accurate and reliable in their signalling, that is they signal 'buy' for turning around at bottoms and 'sell' for turning around at tops. It can be taught to trainees. With experience as an employer I know the respective merits of men and women and would employ women only as trainees in the circumstances I describe. I would employ women to do the task, trading an instrument, for all or part of a market session. They would have to be carefully selected of course. But I could place greater reliance on their cognition, accuracy, speed and loyalty. Men, sooner or later, would be thinking of how they can 'borrow' your methodology and use it for themselves even though they would be contracted not to use elswhere your 'copyright'. Also they sometimes have a tendency to let inferior ideas get in the way of executing prescribed tasks. By the way, I take nothing away from the probable superiority of men as floor traders which has different requirements.
This is interesting...I had this discussion with a neighbor recently who's also a trader. We couldn't come up with a conclusive answer but a lot of what was mentioned here: not aggressive, glass ceiling (with time this will subside a bit and more female traders will trickle in), left/brain-right/brain, ect. I once had a female trader in a trading group that I tried to help...she just didn't pick up on things and was ALWAYS second-guessing herself - her trades, the methodology, the head trader, her desire, ect.
UM, let's see. 90%, or so, of traders lose or have poor returns. Maybe women are just smarter than men.
To the degree we are talking about individual traders, I'm not sure glass ceiling applies here. I still think we just don't have enough data to even validate the premise that there aren't enough women traders. A few random observations don't make a sample ...
Women like a sure thing such as guaranteed income, while trading isn't. We won't find much women in a risky field.