Naz News, Gappers and FLE's

[jwalk]

Interesting. I don't think the women on this board are anywhere near "average."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/money/309856_womeninvest02.html

Investment gender gap: Men tend to charge ahead, women hold back

By ANDREA JAMES
P-I REPORTER

On his and hers investing, here's the breakdown:

He's confident, heady. She's shaky, hesitant.

He's got a game plan and he's optimistic that he's going to meet his financial goals. She contributes less to her retirement account and is less likely to trade stocks.

He trusts his own decisions. She worries more about her financial future, but does less about it.

"He" is the average American man and "she" is the average woman, according to the national Women and Investing Survey that Bellevue-based ShareBuilder Corp. plans to release this week.

But despair not, feminists. Although men say they know how to invest, experts point out that confidence doesn't necessarily translate to skill. She could bat home runs just as well, if only she were not too scared to step up to the plate.

Women are more likely to be intimidated by financial language, the survey showed. To many women, terms such as "positions" and "exchange traded funds" sound like jargon.

"Because so many women have not had the experience, have not gone out and started investing, there is no confidence," said Kim Kiyosaki, author of "Rich Woman," a financial literacy book published in 2006. "They don't know if they can do it or not."

But women are capable, she said, pointing out that many all-women investment clubs outperform all-men clubs.

Women tend to outlive men, so they have to take charge of finances sooner or later. Kiyosaki recommends sooner -- like now.

"The confidence and the self-esteem that I see with women who really grasp this and run with it is really the greatest reward," she said.

ShareBuilder, a deep-discount brokerage firm, partnered with Harris Interactive to randomly survey 2,033 U.S. households online last month. The annual survey helps the company compare all Americans to its customers, and adapt its service to be more user-friendly, Chief Executive Jeff Seely said.

Simply perceiving oneself as knowledgeable is a critical step toward becoming an investor, because people who are scared freeze at the controls, Seely said.

"That attitude -- the way that feels to you as the investor -- is really important," he said.

As women get older, their confidence tends to bump up to the level of men's.

"For their whole life, men feel like they are really knowledgeable about investing," Seely said. But for women, "the good news is that with age comes wisdom."

The survey, which had a 2 percentage-point margin of error, also tracked investing in single versus married folks. Three in four people said that their financial situations were better in marriage than in singledom. Women are better at knowing what they're marrying into -- they were more likely to know their partner's financial situation before getting hitched, the survey found.

Most couples talk about finances in the kitchen, followed by at the computer, in the bedroom and out of the house, the survey found.

Married and partnered people are also the most confident -- 68 percent say they will achieve their investment goals versus 61 percent of single people and 60 percent of those who are separated, divorced or widowed.

Dining out is the largest spending category for both sexes, though women are more than twice as likely to say that clothing is their biggest expense. Men are more likely to peg entertainment as their biggest expense.

Surveys on investment trends and abstract things such as feelings are popular because cold economic models cannot account for the ways that people invest, said Ronnie Sadka, a behavioral finance expert at the University of Washington Business School.

Confidence plays a major role in the markets and how people trade. So does overconfidence and biased self-attribution -- a phenomenon that causes people to think that they are better at picking stocks than is accurate.

"Pure, rational models that we have today cannot explain all the different patterns that we see in the stock market," Sadka said. "People say, 'Maybe we can look at psychological effects.' "

Women's hesitance to invest can make them better decision-makers, Kiyosaki said.

A study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics backs that up with the assertion that overconfidence affects more men than women, thus causing men to trade more and hurt their portfolio performances, according to the 2001 study titled, "Boys will be boys: Gender, overconfidence and common stock investment."

Before women drop a dime on any investments, Kiyosaki recommends taking time to learn. But, she added, the biggest desire to learn comes from already being in the game.

Buy a piece of silver today for about $15, she suggested. Then, women will see how they naturally perk up about news about silver, and want to know more.

"All of a sudden, just because you put in $15 and you have this piece of silver in your hand, you become this mini-expert in silver," she said.

She also advised women to turn their natural tendencies to spend, as highlighted in the survey, into an investment strategy.

"I'm a big spender. I just spend on real estate," Kiyosaki said. "I go shopping for different investments."