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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3499 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 17, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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That is interesting. If men have higher time preference than women, why do men make up the majority of successful investors? Is it because the lower inhibition and higher risk-taking somehow make up for the higher time preference? Or something to do with more men being on the high tail of the intelligence bell curve?

Men are higher variance, fewer women are interested in finance, and success in the markets often involves an element of risk-taking where women might be by nature more conservative.

In general, men do save more than women even though research has repeatedly demonstrated men have generally higher time preference. There are several potential evo-psych explanations for this interesting observation, but little real evidence for any.

Got it, thanks for the explanation. Given that you are a woman in finance, whether it is rational for me to do so or not I take your opinion on this matter more seriously than I would the average person's.

There has been some research conducted on portfolio management, afaik on average female fund managers don’t do much worse than the men, and indeed do better in some years. Extreme outliers who see the highest returns or implode in a year are almost all men, so I think a greater range of male performance is a good explanation.

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