Men didn’t get any better at investing in 2015, at least compared to their female counterparts.
The median male investor lost 1.8 percent over the last 12 months, including fees and dividends, while women squandered only 1.4 percent, according to a review of 360,000 investors using robo-advisorSigfig to track their portfolios.
Of course, we’re all pretty dismal — the S&P 500 was down 1.1 percent over that same period. So if everyone invested $100,000, the median man threw away $670 more than if he had simply invested in an index fund, and the median woman wasted $270.
In a sense, that’s actually better than last year, when the market was up. The median investor last year far underperformed the booming market; the average man investing a hypothetical $100,000 made $8,250 less than the S&P 500 and the average woman made $7,650 less.
This certainly isn’t the first time analysts have looked at the gender difference in investing. Researchers noticed the trend two decades ago: Men tend to be overconfident in their trading, and to trade far more often than women.
That’s a bad idea for at least two reasons: It wastes money on transaction fees, and it makes it easier to trade in reaction to short-term changes in the market. For example, Sigfig found that traders who reacted to the market correction in August 2015 tended to do worst than those who did nothing.
For those reasons, traders with the highest turnover in their portfolios consistently underperform their more patient peers — in 2015, the median portfolio with 100 percent turnover lost nearly 5 percent, while those with less than 10 percent turnover lost less than 1 percent.
On the bright side, men may have learned a thing or two in the last year; the turnover gap between men and women narrowed very slightly this year compared to 2014.
Men still have a long way to go. The 2015 data suggest that men trade about 30 percent more than women, which isn’t much better than the 45 percent researchers found for men trading from 1991 to 1997.
Men and women also tend to pick different stocks to invest in, but it looks like moving investments around too much is the main factor causing the performance gap. According to a Big Crunch analysis, there doesn’t seem to be a strong relationship between a female preference for a stock and its price change over the last year. Take a look at that data yourself below:
Ticker
Company
Female pref.
Price change
AA
Alcoa Inc.
13.4%
-36.0%
AAPL
Apple Inc.
7.6%
4.3%
ABBV
AbbVie, Inc.
33.2%
-11.7%
ABT
Abbott Laboratories
22.1%
6.1%
AMZN
Amazon.com
8.0%
129.0%
AXP
American Express
-7.0%
-19.9%
BA
Boeing Company
6.8%
19.2%
BABA
Alibaba Group
14.4%
-20.0%
BAC
Bank of America
-4.0%
6.2%
BIDU
Baidu, Inc.
11.8%
-9.4%
BMY
Bristol-Myers Squibb
1.8%
22.6%
BP
BP p.l.c.
-17.6%
-13.7%
BRK.B
Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
5.8%
-6.5%
C
Citigroup Inc.
-2.1%
5.3%
CAT
Caterpillar Inc.
6.6%
-24.2%
CELG
Celgene
4.8%
5.1%
CMCSA
Comcast
12.5%
7.1%
COP
ConocoPhillips
1.5%
-21.9%
COST
Costco
-3.4%
18.5%
CSCO
Cisco Systems, Inc.
-2.3%
2.4%
CVS
CVS Health
7.7%
5.7%
CVX
Chevron
-0.5%
-8.1%
DD
E. I. du Pont de Nemours
14.3%
1.6%
DIS
Walt Disney
3.1%
26.2%
DOW
Dow Chemical
0.1%
18.8%
DUK
Duke Energy
15.9%
-13.1%
EMC
EMC
2.3%
-7.4%
EMR
Emerson Electric Co.
9.0%
-22.1%
ESRX
Express Scripts
24.6%
9.1%
F
Ford Motor
-5.6%
1.9%
FB
Facebook, Inc. Class A
5.0%
43.0%
FCX
Freeport-McMoRan, Inc.
-6.4%
-68.4%
FTR
Frontier Comm
19.5%
-25.5%
GE
General Electric
3.1%
26.5%
GILD
Gilead Sciences, Inc.
1.2%
2.9%
GLW
Corning Incorporated
25.8%
-10.7%
GM
General Motors
-18.0%
14.4%
GOOG
Alphabet Inc. Class C
36.1%
53.4%
GOOGL
Alphabet Inc. Class A
30.8%
55.9%
GSK
GlaxoSmithKline
5.1%
-4.0%
HD
Home Depot, Inc.
7.5%
36.9%
HPQ
HP Inc.
-7.4%
-27.6%
IBM
IBM Corp
1.5%
-8.0%
INTC
Intel
7.9%
-0.7%
JNJ
Johnson & Johnson
13.8%
2.4%
JPM
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
41.1%
15.6%
KHC
Kraft Heinz
39.6%
24.1%
KMB
Kimberly-Clark
11.4%
12.0%
KMI
Kinder Morgan Inc
1.5%
-58.1%
KO
Coca-Cola
4.7%
8.5%
LLY
Eli Lilly and Company
18.2%
24.6%
LMT
Lockheed Martin
0.3%
17.3%
LUV
Southwest Airlines Co.
17.3%
13.2%
MA
MasterCard
2.4%
21.1%
MCD
McDonald’s
20.2%
32.8%
MDLZ
Mondelez
14.6%
24.5%
MDT
Medtronic Plc
-2.6%
10.1%
MMM
3M Company
8.3%
-5.7%
MO
Altria Group, Inc.
-3.8%
19.5%
MRK
Merck & Co., Inc.
25.6%
-4.9%
MSFT
Microsoft
-0.8%
24.3%
NFLX
Netflix, Inc.
9.3%
171.3%
NKE
NIKE
-10.4%
40.5%
ORCL
Oracle
-0.7%
-4.2%
PEP
PepsiCo, Inc.
9.0%
9.2%
PFE
Pfizer Inc.
43.2%
6.2%
PG
Procter & Gamble
16.0%
-9.4%
PM
Philip Morris
4.4%
10.8%
PSX
Phillips 66
-1.9%
23.9%
QCOM
QUALCOMM
5.0%
-31.6%
SBUX
Starbucks
7.2%
52.5%
SE
Spectra Energy
37.4%
-28.3%
SIRI
Sirius XM
16.8%
22.8%
SLB
Schlumberger NV
-14.5%
-11.2%
SO
Southern Company
-3.2%
-3.0%
T
AT&T Inc.
7.9%
7.0%
TGT
Target
-10.2%
2.1%
TSLA
Tesla Motors, Inc.
-11.9%
18.6%
TWTR
Twitter, Inc.
-19.8%
-30.8%
TWX
Time Warner
28.9%
-18.2%
UA
Under Armour
-9.7%
25.1%
UNH
UnitedHealth Group
1.9%
24.0%
UTX
United Technologies
2.1%
-16.0%
V
Visa Inc. Class A
8.4%
26.1%
VZ
Verizon
12.6%
2.2%
WBA
Walgreens Boots Alliance
40.9%
17.0%
WFC
Wells Fargo
-2.3%
5.8%
WFM
Whole Foods Market
25.1%
-29.7%
WMT
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
14.7%
-27.3%
XOM
Exxon Mobil
4.3%
-8.4%
YHOO
Yahoo! Inc.
10.3%
-30.8%
PMCS
PMC-Sierra, Inc.
1217.3%
34.1%
[“source -cncb”]