

Raging Bull Markets: How Young Men’s Hormones Unsettle Finance - rbanffy
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-02/raging-bull-markets-how-young-men-s-hormones-unsettle-finance

======
hueving
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.

~~~
mistermann
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.

~~~
JesperRavn
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.

~~~
mistermann
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.

------
ams6110
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.

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

------
JesperRavn
_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.

