Raging Bull Markets: How Young Men’s Hormones Unsettle Finance | Hacker News Reader

Raging Bull Markets: How Young Men’s Hormones Unsettle Finance

bloomberg.com

11 pointsrbanffy9 comments

If this is the case, why isn't there an example of a leading firm that only accepts women and old traders? This has been suggested many times before, but the loss of aggressiveness must cause some loss of competitive edge or else we would have real examples of it.

Women have been trading for a long time, and there doesn't seem to be much evidence of them outperforming the men.

>why isn't there an example of a leading firm that only accepts women and old traders?

Probably because that's illegal?

I think maybe what the authors are saying is that is unsettles the markets in the aggregate...more volatility, more bubbles and crashes, not necessarily that women are better traders.

It would probably be worthwhile for someone to do a statistical study on the effect of gender on trading success, but I'm not sure if anyone's done that. I'd say it's worth doing, because from the hiring perspective, judging from the gender makeup of the "online trading" community and assuming that is representative of the academic community, the vast majority of hyper-immersed/kowledgeable people in the game are males. Whether they perform better on average than females, I wouldn't even hazard a guess.

If they were, that is extremely suspect, since you can't just create an accurate simulation of financial markets in a lab (while you can easily simulate the trading performance of an individual). Nonetheless, they have no finance people and one economist listed, and so it wouldn't surprise me if this is what they were trying to do.

True, but it wouldn't be that difficult to just collect the "trading recommendations" of various people from brokerages, but then I'm sure all recommendations are done in a way that that is not possible. These aren't dumb people we're dealing with.

Women have been trading for a long time, and there doesn't seem to be much evidence of them outperforming the men.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/01/ec...

Cavets: this is investing, not trading, maybe that is a meaningful difference, maybe not. I have seen this reported a few places, but haven't really looked at the original studies myself.

Was the study controlled for age? I couldn't quite tell. Because another explanation is that young men lack the experience necessary to have developed good judgment.

Probably not, because it'd be insanely complicated to check testosterone levels on the subjects.

By reducing the effects of hormones on trading, “you should get better returns and longer period of stability where people make money,” Roberts said. “That’s beneficial to everyone.”

I don't see how everyone can make money in what is essentially a zero sum game, but that's probably just my testosterone talking.

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