Stock Club EP#176: Closing the Gender Gap in Investing

Key Highlights:

Transcript:

Emmet Savage: 0:00

in the UK found that women investors averaged 0.81% more than men in their returns over a three-year period, and if that was sustained for 30 years, the average woman would end up at a portfolio where 25% more than the average man.

Anne Marie: 0:16

Women make the decision to purchase 94% of home furnishings, 92% of vacations, 91% of homes, 60% of automobiles and 51% of consumer electronics. So basically these marketers were saying, hey, like a strategy moving forward might target these women, because they have a bunch of money and they spend a bunch of money and they're not really being addressed by the current way that we're advertising.

Emmet Savage: 0:36

Women invest endlessly, from the word go. They invest in their education, their careers. They invest in their community, their friends, their family, their kids, everything. Everyone who has a woman in their life sees that they invest heavily in their stuff. So it's quite ironic that in the matter of stock investing, historically women did not engage.

Michael O’Mahony: 1:03

Hi there, I'm Lekin of Stock Club, a podcast brought to you by my Wall Street. I'm Mike on a journey. Today's episode is an amateur memory from my Wall Street analyst team. A quick word for my friends and sponsors at Vodafone Business before we move ahead. Vodafone have recently launched their V Hub Digital Advisory Service, offering Irish businesses of all sizes free one-to-one digital support and advice. You don't even have to be a Vodafone business customer to avail of this service. Search Vodafone V Hub to book a call with one of the V Hub digital experts and we will leave a link in the show notes for today's episode. Amri Amish, welcome to another episode of Stock Club. Good to have you both. A bit of a bittersweet episode today. Amri, you're leaving us for a bit, so this is your last episode of the year, I think. Is that a fair summation?

Anne Marie: 1:42

Yeah, I think so. Maybe wandering is the correct term rather than travelling, because not all plans have been established yet but I'm definitely going to some music festivals. I'm going to go to Spain for a bit with my friends and then I'm going to go home to Colorado and do some travelling around the US and just going to chill out for a minute. I'm exhausted. I'm 26. It's just all hit me now. I think it's time for my first retirement.

Michael O’Mahony: 2:11

A quarter-life crisis.

Anne Marie: 2:13

Yeah, which I did not label it that emitting yeah yeah, because I had a QLC at 26.

Emmet Savage: 2:20

I went in and I resigned and my employer was like no, it's okay, we'll figure it out and that's how I want to pay it forward. But I went down to New Zealand and lived down there, as I mentioned to you guys I think it was 2002, so 21 years ago.

Michael O’Mahony: 2:35

Yeah, I packed it in and moved to New York at about 25. So, yeah, it all fits. It's about that age I'm scheduled.

Anne Marie: 2:43

So we'll see what happens. Yeah, so last show of the year.

Michael O’Mahony: 2:48

We let you pick the topic and that was a very important one, I think, probably one we don't discuss enough, and that's women in investing. So maybe more accurately, the lack of women investing, which is the unfortunate side of things. So women invest much less than men, but a number of studies have shown they actually make better investors. So Amish you have a very interesting story from the leaders at Charis Swab about this and I think it's worth retelling today.

Emmet Savage: 3:15

It certainly is, mike. Back in 2013, john, john Thierry and I went to America to figure out our US brokerage offering and how would we extend a brokerage capability to my Wall Street customers, and Enterprise Ireland, who is a backer of ours, was willing and able to open more or less any door we requested. And, as some of our listeners know, enterprise Ireland or EI, is the government organisation here responsible for the development of Irish enterprises in world markets, and they have a network absolutely everywhere. It's unbelievable. Another year, John and I were down in Australia and Enterprise Ireland had literally could get us anywhere Anyway. So it's pretty unbelievable how omnipresent they are in the world of enterprise, which was very useful for us in the earliest days. Anyway, one of the introductions made from EI came in the form of John Thierryl talking to Charles Swab, like Chuck Chuck himself, the Charles Swab. Yes, his namesake business is now a $110 billion company and one of the largest retail brokers in the world, maybe the largest, but it's an absolute behemoth. And all of our listeners have heard of Swab because if you listen to his podcast, you'll have noticed them. What's remarkable about that phone call between JT and Swab is that number one I pulled in so that he could talk in silence, which involved him walking into a giant pumpkin field for the purpose of doing so, and I mentioned that on a podcast on this podcast before, and I think we posted the picture somewhere. And the second thing that was remarkable was, of course, he was talking to Chuck, but, in fairness, at that time they were a bit small. They only had $2.25 trillion in client assets and 9.1 million active brokerage accounts, so they were tiny. It was way back in 2013. Anyway, what John was told was that, when they looked at the historical investment performance of men versus women with that ginormous data set, women outperform men because, in short, they were less likely to fiddle with the stocks after every little piece of news. Again, on the whole, they would allow the seasons and years to roll by without trading, where men, on the other hand where shall we say? More vulnerable to buying and selling on rumour and news, whereas women sat tight. And despite that, we also learned that women are more risk averse than men.

Michael O’Mahony: 5:55

And is that like rooted in fact, or is that opinion?

Emmet Savage: 5:59

No, the risk averse thing is there's endless studies, endless studies on the notion that women are generally more risk averse than men, especially in financial matters, and I have a few here to list off. The first is Barbara and Odin, in 2001, conducted a study called Boys Will Be Boys Gender OverConfidence and Common Stock Investment, and they found that men trade 45% more than women, reducing men's net return by 2.65 percentage points per year compared to women. And this higher trading activity was attributed to overconfidence in men, indicating that women's relative risk aversion led to a more stable investment strategy. A few years prior to that, in 1998, there was a study by Sundin and Siuret, which found that women are more likely to choose guaranteed income streams, such as bonds, whereas men are more likely to invest in riskier assets. And in the same year, in 1998, there was another study by Cenkampus and Bernaske, which published a study that analysed the relationship between gender and risk aversion using data from the survey of consumer finances, and they found that single women in the study exhibited far greater risk aversion in their financial investments compared to single men, which is understandable. And then, even more recently, in 2011, domen et al found that women are more risk averse than men across various domains, not just financial, whoever. They also emphasised that the difference in risk attitudes between men and women might be influenced by cultural, societal and educational things. And again, it was a big survey and again it was not shocking. There's so many surveys and so many really academic papers on this matter and 2012,. Charnas and Neese provided evidence that women tend to be more risk averse than men in financial situations, but these differences are context dependent. It goes on and on and on. Another deep study in 2008 said it was by Cardens and Carpenter had this controlled experiment that found that, while women were more risk averse than men, the difference was more pronounced in patriarchal societies compared to matriarchal societies, which suggested that all the norms we see and structures play a role in shaping risk attitudes. And even Ann Marie and I were chatting yesterday and she told me that heart grieves and mans down in the UK found that women investors averaged 0.81% more than men in their returns over a three year period and if that was sustained for 30 years, the average woman would end up at a portfolio where 25% more than the average man. And all of this. I could go on and on and on, but I guess the point is that this is not really a surprise to anyone, really. It's just not. I mean, if you grew up in a traditional homestead with a male and a female, it's more likely that the male was more involved in at least contemplating stock investing. I think that's hardly a shocking insight.

Michael O’Mahony: 10:58

So what do you do with that information then, because there's a lot there to take in there is.

Emmet Savage: 11:02

I mean, that's a very good question, because John and I figured that the right thing to do 10 years ago was to launch a product that gets the world's female population investing successfully. So when we were in our kind of fact finding stage and we realised that women are, as a matter of fact, data, better investors but they are far, far less likely to do it, it felt like a blue ocean strategy for us to go and address. But the more we considered it, I think, the less credible it felt. As to white Irish guys which is just a fact and also wrongly perhaps we didn't want to launch a pink biro. At that time, bic in South Africa posted an ad on its Facebook page to celebrate Women's Month you know this one, Anne Marie and it showed a smiling woman in a suit with her arms folded and it read beneath look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, work like a boss. Hashtag happy women's day. It was the roaches.

Michael O’Mahony: 12:08

That's the real girl boss attitude there.

Anne Marie: 12:11

Yeah, they also corresponded with them releasing pens for women. That was the one yeah they were just pink and I think they tried to argue they were like we've made them for women's hands and it was just. It was a pen.

Emmet Savage: 12:25

Oh, yeah, that was the marketing campaign and that was a hot thing then. I mean it was absolutely outrageous, I think I mean anyone with the brain in their head looked at it through the fingers under our hands. Go and please, no, make it stop. I mean we were very sensitive then at that time to building a product that could be even vaguely accused of mansplaining. I mean it's not in our nature, we didn't want to do that, but a product just for women wasn't right for us at that time, despite the fact that the opportunity was there to white dudes from Dublin sorry, from Galway in Dublin building a product. That just was wrong.

Michael O’Mahony: 13:01

Yeah, it was a bit of a virtue signalling, maybe, to it.

Emmet Savage: 13:03

Yeah, yeah.

Michael O’Mahony: 13:05

So what's your view on female investing today, 10 years on, have you learned? What have you learned in the meantime?

Emmet Savage: 13:10

Well, what's ironic is that, on the whole, women invest endlessly, from the word go. They invest in their education, their careers. They invest in their community, their friends, their family, their kids, the gym, sports, yoga, kickboxing, their parents, everything. Everyone has a woman in their life, and sees that they invest heavily in their stuff. So it's quite ironic that in the matter of stock investing, historically women did not engage. Every woman is an investor. It's in front of our eyes, it's there to be seen. Women are naturally investors and when we have a horizon, get together. As you both well know, the room is about 80% male, at least, maybe 90% Last year. What would you guess? Last year the room was about 90% male in the room.

Michael O’Mahony: 14:00

Yeah, it's not far off, I think, Anne Marie and. Zoe and Nicole probably made up a bit of numbers as well, yeah that's right.

Emmet Savage: 14:08

So certainly, as a company doing nothing to gender tilt the table, where we were neither a pink big or a man only club, we've seen more males naturally arrive to our product set. There's nothing in our branding, nothing that says man, nothing Like I remember at the time when we were looking at our branding and what we stood for and our logos, our colour palette. There's a load of brands out there that are clearly alpha male, like Itaro, two big bulls horns coming out the side of its logo.

Michael O’Mahony: 14:43

That's a fact. To say that the big bull is real. Yeah, exactly.

Emmet Savage: 14:49

And then there's others like plus 500. There's nothing about it. There's brands out there that very clearly have put themselves, are tilted the table, to be more appealing than they're to a traditional male, if you like, but we, without doing that, have seen more males, which I think is a pity because, as I said, women are better investors, and that's just a matter of fact.

Michael O’Mahony: 15:12

Before we move on then I just remembered from that story with Chuck Schwab I remember it was always women were better investors than men, but wasn't there a third category that were the best investors of all? Do you remember this?

Emmet Savage: 15:24

The deceased, was it yeah?

Michael O’Mahony: 15:28

Dead people had the best returns out of anyone in the.

Emmet Savage: 15:30

Chuck Schwab, that's right and they'd never sell. And actually it's funny because there are so many pieces of literature right over the years where the author, who almost invariably was a man, would say women make better investors. And I dived into the subject just to get some facts which I blurted out there a few moments ago. But like my favorite or one of my favorite investing books, One of the Mall Street by Peter Lynch, he talks about his wife found his best investments and the way he, I suppose, the way he describes it, I suppose is a little bit culturally outdated, the way he uses his tone of voice and the way he describes it, but is meant in the highest, most, the highest regard possible. And that was an anecdote. He said my wife found legs, pantyhose, and she told me about them. And those anecdotes led to him investing in what was it? La Coyote, motels or something like that, and all these different kinds of products that she had insights that he otherwise didn't have, while sitting on the top floor of Fidelity eating prawn sandwiches, you know, 12, 30. So but really when you kind of take that, he was on the money and he was right and big data has proven that women make better investors, but marginally pipped by the deceased.

Michael O’Mahony: 16:59

I mean second to a group of dead guys.

Emmet Savage: 17:03

We will perform the dad.

Anne Marie: 17:05

That's the true blue ocean opportunity. There is an abundant amount of dead people in the world.

Emmet Savage: 17:09

How do you get in there?

Michael O’Mahony: 17:12

What a market untapped.

Anne Marie: 17:15

Well, there's ads on.

Emmet Savage: 17:16

TV for, you know, getting yourself ready for when the grim reaper arrives. You know there's this. You know, as it's for only two, nine to nine a week, we'll make sure your funeral is paid for. Maybe we should do something. For only five bucks a week We'll invest in tomorrow's giants today.

Michael O’Mahony: 17:34

Before you get to Macabre. Now I'm just going to give a quick promo to our newsletter, charging and fearless. So we're delivering to your inbox one of the most unique products on the market and it's completely free. No one else is covering the markets we've covered with charging for us, or we deliver to you a new weekly stock pitch that could be from Amsterdam, tokyo, paris or somewhere in between. So it's a completely free stock pitch every week. We'll have it read in about 30 seconds flat and we can almost guarantee most of these companies are going to be brand new to you, which is where you get an edge. So sign up now in the show notes for this episode.

Emmet Savage: 18:02

Mike, I want to come in on that, because I want to talk about charging fearlessly for 20 seconds because I know some of our listeners have subscribed completely free. Occasionally you might have to scroll past an advert, don't worry, there's no drama there. But when we designed that, or when I sat down to figure out what we could send out, I was inspired by Scott Galloway's weekly email, which is called no Mercy, no Malice, because the information in that email you can't Google. Well, you can, but you could piece it together, but it's just a beautiful, succinct opinion that was absolutely original. So the inspiration for charging fearless was a beautifully succinct, completely original, not Googleable piece of content that adds true value and I think we've delivered it and what I? The one thing I just wanted to say is that we have a pixel at the very bottom of the email, which means that 60% of nearly 100,000 people read the whole thing and just for industry standards, kind of to get maybe 10% read rate or 20%, is good. To have 60% of people read the whole thing is my way of just saying to our listeners. It definitely delivers value. So just sign up. I'm so proud of that product and I have to say hats off to the two of you because you were huge in its architecture, design and delivery.

Michael O’Mahony: 19:19

Yeah, I'm very, very interested in the one I've already just published. Well, sorry, that is going to be published this week as well. It's a stock. It's a company and product. I've heard of it a lot but didn't realise it was a stock, and I I know. When you talk about niche motes, I think this really defines it well. But yeah, true to type Amarie, we've been talking about women investing for 15 minutes now and it's just been two men on the line. So nailing it once again, exactly yeah we're perpetuating all the stereotypes we're talking about, but no, we're saving the best to the last is how I put that, because I feel like it would be a tough show to follow or, sorry you, would be a tough show for Emma to follow if we would do it the other way around. So, I'm hoping I realised halfway through which is awesome we're talking about dead people. I'm like we're talking about women. Investing here is too long. So, Anne Marie, we've heard how women make great investors, but what does female representation look like in the investing world?

Anne Marie: 20:24

It's not great.

Michael O’Mahony: 20:25

We need to.

Anne Marie: 20:26

We're working on it, yeah. So as of 2018, a survey by MassMutual found that 41% of American women invest, compared to 55% of men, and that's all like all people of all ages. So you might be like, okay, fair enough, like probably women above the baby booboo generation were probably more likely to resign to kind of wealth management, financial planning, retirement savings aspects to their husbands, and we're more likely to be kind of handling the at home finances, which is kind of a traditional view, but we actually have data on that, so you have to be saying let's go, it's fine. Women coming through have big corporate jobs, but even for millennials, the stats don't look great. So, as of last year, only 26% of millennial women invest outside of their workplace retirement accounts, compared to 43% of millennial men, and an investment account outside of your work account is genuinely anything outside of a 401k, and I know plenty of people. An aspect of their retirement savings has to be investing through like another private retirement account. You know whether that be like a Roth IRA or something like that. So that's not great to see. We would like to see some more women jumping in there Also, the way that they're investing. We could probably be holding a meeting about typically investing 40% less money, which you don't like to see, and they prefer low risk options like bonds and index funds, leaving 71% of their portfolio on average in savings, which you know, as Emmett just listed off all those stats about being risk averse they really are when you see it in the numbers. This kind of dynamic is also really reflected in the customer breakdown of retail investment platforms and I think that their Etoro, you know, the big bowl hasn't been the most warm welcome. Yeah, that's shown in their customer statistics only 15% of their users are women and only 30% of interactive investors customers are women, so it seems like maybe they're all at Charles Schwab. You know that's that. The takeaway from today is Chuck's done a really good job, which also, as you were telling that story, emmett, I was like I didn't know Charles Schwab was a real person.

Emmet Savage: 22:23

Oh yeah.

Anne Marie: 22:24

I thought it was like a made up business name that they were like. That sounds like a professional that can be the name of the company.

Emmet Savage: 22:30

I thought it was like waiting, I think they had at that time. 20% of their base were women. So even when compared to those two giants that you mentioned today, I and Etoro were ahead of their curve 10 years ago.

Anne Marie: 22:43

Yeah Well, and I think it is fair to mention that, like maybe it's because the women have kind of siloed off into other areas. There's a company I've been quite impressed with that's emerged probably over the last five to seven years, which is called Elvest, and I think Elvest's turn on this is they're going okay. There are more women in the workplace. There are more women who have really kind of high ranking corporate jobs, and are making money. They need to be doing this retirement stuff. And the way that Elvest has kind of propositioned us to consumers is smart, where they've removed investing from this kind of far off world and they've attempted to integrate it more into kind of everyday finances. So they run the entire thing through what looks like a really easy to use banking app and you can automate a huge amount of the tasks. I know a couple of my friends back home. They have like Elvest credit cards and rather than getting you know like a cashback reward or a travel perk every time that they spend money through their credit card, it automates an investment process and it puts money in an index fund or a managed mutual fund or something like that. But Elvest again is like it's very hands off for the consumer. No one is picking independent stocks. It's, you know, robo investing, it's mutual funds and it's paying a pretty hefty fee in order to get that done. But you know, if it's the type of thing like the only way to get you to invest is to just kind of have you not think about it. I suppose that's fair enough and, like Elvest, has been back to my number of significant big investors. The biggest one is probably Melinda Gates, who got in very, very early. So there is definitely movement in this space to get more women to participate. But I do think it's probably the urgency with which it needs to be addressed means that kind of some of the onus is going to actually fall on individuals, whether that be women themselves or like people within women's lives who have some aspect of financial literacy or going to them being like we got to start now. Like the time to start saving for your retirement is 40 years beforehand, so you know you should be targeting people now.

Michael O’Mahony: 24:27

Yeah, we're talking about, like, the risk averseness of women, the one plus side of that. I know that means that they're sitting out a bit, but the one plus side of that is, I'd say, very few women got caught up in the NFT and crypto craze of the last two years. You're talking about 15% in eToro, I'd say open sea and Finance. It's about two or 3%.

Anne Marie: 24:48

Yeah, actually I think I hit stats on that at one point. I remember doing an FML episode which was the podcast that me and Nicole used to host before Nicole ran off for her retirement in Australia. That it was something crazy. Like NFT participation was like 95% male, like someone had done a survey. It was very, yeah, lopsided.

Michael O’Mahony: 25:09

It sounds about right, but what do you think now is the cause of this lack of participation in investing for women?

Anne Marie: 25:18

It's probably too. It's probably economic and then probably more important now at this point, it's social. In terms of economics, the most important factor is going to be the wage gap. It's just like having less money to play with and less money to invest with. Back in 2018, on average, an American woman made 81 cents for every dollar a man made, and that meant that their median annual earnings were almost $10,000 less. And then, even when we correct for differences in career path, in no occupational category does a woman out earn a man, and some of them they're beginning to reach parity, which is very nice to see. And actually there's been a number of companies which we've discussed in the context of investing which have really gone out of their way to ensure pay parity. One that I remember particularly is Salesforce. Actually, they have like a whole portion of their HR department dedicated to just analysing wages and making sure that people are being paid fairly, and they released a study last year and it was something they were like just due to inadvertent bias. Every year, they would correct people's salaries and they would make sure oh, you know all of these computer scientists they'd all need to be on the same pay. So if someone gets a raise, they would just increase everybody else around them in the department, and it was something that they basically said. We have to correct wages every three to six months because it just happens that, because of, probably, socialisation, men were just either better at going in and asking for raises or they were better at just getting them from their managers, and so the HR department was behind the scenes constantly just like micro increasing everybody's salaries to make sure that there was parity. So there is a lot of work going behind that and there are companies and sectors that are doing well, so I do think there's that.

Michael O’Mahony: 27:00

There's that awful argument where, oh well the page, the pay gap is there because women choose different jobs. So men choose to be computer scientists and engineers and doctors and women choose to be female computer scientists and female engineers and female doctors.

Anne Marie: 27:16

Yeah, I also really hate that argument because they're always. They always turn that around and they'll be like men's skills are scalable. They'll be like oh, they're a computer engineer, they make software and that is scalable, so they get to make more money because the businesses make more money. And I'm like well, women are nurses and teachers, which is technically also scalable via the people that they interact with. And also, who is saying that nurses and teachers shouldn't make more money? Like who's standing there being, like, I think, the computer engineer should be more.

Michael O’Mahony: 27:41

That is a dangerous hill to die on.

Anne Marie: 27:44

Yeah, so, anyway. So we would love pay parity. That would be great if women had more money. They would probably then just say how it would be less difficult to say, do you know what? Yes, I will set aside $500 a month and I will put it in a retirement account and I will invest with it, and some of it can go into individual stocks. So I think that's number one. But it's something insane. Like if we continue with the current rate in which we're trying to reach pay parity, we're going to reach it in like 93 years, so that we can't wait. This is too. You know, we got to do some other things. So then, the kind of number one way that we need to address this, particularly if you are a woman yourself, or you have a woman in your life who you would love to start investing, or maybe you have a daughter that you're like she needs to know this before she goes off and gets a job or she has the money to do so. It's just kind of exposing women to investing and talking about it and making it a little bit less scary. So there's like a bunch of studies on this. There's like a statistic where they say women are rational investors, but then sometimes that term is expanded out to say that they are recklessly cautious. And so how do we educate women in a way that gets them away from this recklessly cautious mindset? And Charlotte Young, who started a charity called Girls Are Investors in the United States. She said that the number one thing is just providing a place to talk about it and maybe creating lessons that could be integrated into a classroom, or even you know easy programs, even kind of like our learn app, even just sending the learn app to someone to be like, hey, sit down, make it right through this. This is super easy. She found that women are taught that the route to financial empowerment is via budgeting, while men tend to be taught about investing at a younger age, and this is reinforced by statistics that only 29% of women reported that their parents showed them how to grow wealth beyond simply making a salary. So it is that thing of like something they're like dads aren't sitting down and being like this is how I set up my Roth IRA. The other reason is probably, you know, we can sit here and say, oh, you know, if you're being taught about investing outside of a classroom. There's a pretty high likelihood that a woman, depending on what phase of her life she's in, she actually might not have the time to do that, because it's like 75% of unpaid labour within the home is done by a woman. So, you know, while the men are off reading about NFTs and buying NFTs for 12 hours a day during the pandemic, there's a, you know, there's a likelihood that a woman maybe wouldn't be in that position and that, again, is enforced through statistics. It was something like after the pandemic, it was far more likely that a woman had to exit her career in order to care for a loved one and it meant that, like, women's participation in employment had dropped after 2020 and 2021. So, like they're just kind of these exterior factors that mean that, like prioritising investment education probably isn't at the top of your list, which I think actually means that we should be doing it younger. You know you should be doing it before these kinds of obstacles come up. You should be talking to your teenagers about it. You should be talking to people in their 20s about it, because once we have that education and place, things go pretty well. So only 46% of millennial women reported feeling confident about their ability to invest. But once they start, 77% of those women feel that they will be able to accumulate enough money to support themselves for life. So it is that thing of it's just the first step, like it's just getting out the door, it's just setting up the account, it's just making the decision to say, okay, I'll do this, I'll put in 100 bucks every month. And like to be honest, like I also think we need to be better at just kind of granting people the good and like this is good enough, like we talk a lot about you know you can beat the market, you could buy individual stocks, you can kind of tap into companies that you know and interact with. But at the end of the day, if you're super, super busy, I think it is completely acceptable to set up a retirement account and just say I'm putting money in the S&P 500 every month and I will reexamine this in five years and I think that's fair enough, like that is 100% good enough, particularly if you're in your 20s or 30s, because you've such a long runway. Like you are going to accumulate life changing wealth, generational wealth that you will leave after you die and then maybe make more money after you die because it will continue to perform as we have learned.

Emmet Savage: 31:43

With our new product.

Anne Marie: 31:45

Yeah, my Wall Street death, my Wall Street death.

Michael O’Mahony: 31:51

Oh it's funny you say that like, isn't, that's the number one rule. Number one golden rule in Wall Street is to just get started. That's the kick. You need to just make that from zero to one and then from there you don't exactly know what you said. You can just index funds, you can be very sensible or you can dive head first into it. There's so many levels of what you can do, but to get started is the most important thing. Yeah, so you mentioned the lack of confidence and exposure as a barrier to women beginning to invest. So what kind of things do you think will motivate the next generation of female investors to jump in and to get started?

Anne Marie: 32:28

Well, I kind of mentioned some in the previous question. You know, just education, I think a big thing that myself and Nicole always used to talk about, which is talk to your friends and your family. You know, if you're kind of already on the inside of the bubble and you're already investing, you should feel an onus to be like, okay, I know Well, like so and so isn't investing. I know they're not financially planning. Maybe I'll go talk to them just to make it even easier to take that first step to go from zero to one. I actually something that I've been thinking about recently is maybe Like grounding those discussions around the idea that the stock market is not entirely separate from us, because I think sometimes if you, particularly if you come from a family or maybe investment hasn't been done before it has been something that you've talked about, it can feel like the stock market is something only wealthy people do and it's really far away from you and it's not integrated into your economy at all. And so I think, by thinking about Stocks as businesses in which you interact with and picking stocks that way, I think is a great way to demystify it For yourself, and you know like women control a lot of spending power as, like they have entered the workforce more and more and they have big, high powered jobs. You know they do like push forward a number of industries is as I'm it was saying, you know, peter lynching. I found investments in my wife because she was exposed to these companies that I would never consider, because you know they're targeted at women, like there's a lot of businesses like that today that do fly under the radar, and because you know a lot of financial analysts tend to be men, it takes forever for people to go and find them like there are companies like that right now that women probably know about, men don't, and so, but it's like I don't think this is an overly. It's not too distant from us, and this is something that Myself and Nicole talked about in terms of a Becky fund, which was an idea that was floated probably like four years ago. It's a shame that we didn't point at ourselves, because it is quite a good idea, and the basis for a Becky fund Was a Harvard Business Review study that was done back in 2009, so it's a while ago now and they were. They were they weren't studying stocks, they were studying marketing trends Because they notice their as, like, the economy has shifted up and more women have gone into corporate America and they go into, you know, like tech or medicine, and they make a lot of money and meant that there were these women who were kind of at the top of the economic table, who were making a lot of money but who then also were spending a lot of money and they had like a disproportionate amount of spending power. And these women make up twenty four percent of the female population in the United States, but they control thirty four percent of female purchasing power and in some sectors it is crazy how much power they have. So women make the decision to purchase ninety four percent of home furnishings, ninety two percent of vacations, ninety one percent of homes, sixty percent of automobiles and fifty one percent of consumer electronics. So basically these marketers are saying, hey, like a strategy moving forward might target these women because they have a bunch of money and they spend a bunch of money and you know they're not really being addressed by the current way that we're advertising. And that was kind of an interesting idea. And then an investment analyst saw that and said do you know what? There's probably stocks like that too. So this got the attention of some investment analysts that were like do you know what? There's probably a way for us to pick stocks the exact same way. So they dubbed these high spending women who have a bunch of money. They dubbed them Becky's and they were like what companies do Becky's like? And then that caused a huge debate online. Someone was like there are seventy two Becky stocks, but you know, there's probably less than that is probably about twenty five or thirty. So then I sat down, like two years ago, and was like OK, let's pick out a few Becky stocks that were stocks that we also talk about all the time on my Wall Street and I assembled a really short list. So it was Apple, chipotle, etsy, facebook, lululemon, netflix, pinterest, peloton, shopify and Starbucks, which you know. Those are all companies that we interact with all the time. Women interact with them all the time, and if we created a little portfolio and we added in just a hundred bucks when we initially started talking about those companies which for a lot of them, we started talking about them when my Wall Street was launched, the consumer facing side back in 2015 like Apple easily, chipotle, easily, facebook. So as of right now, starting in 2015 and just putting in and just leaving, just putting money and leaving it, that fund would be up two hundred and fifty percent compared to the S&P, which is up eighty five percent. And even if you took Shopify out, which, like you know, I would admit, maybe someone who doesn't want to do any investment education wouldn't pick Shopify, because Shopify is like a back end player. You know they're, they're platforming even then the fund is up one hundred and seventy five percent versus eighty five percent of the S&P. So by just picking companies that you routinely interact with, some of them are going to be bad, peloton Bad, but most of them are up and most of them are doing pretty well. So I think that's a good way to kind of approach women who are on the boundary of considering investing. You know this is not too separate from you. These companies are stuff that you go to every single day. You probably shop for them, probably own their stuff, you probably like them. Yeah, that's a really easy way to start investing.

Michael O’Mahony: 37:22

It's really interesting because that's the exact Peter Lynch ethos that keeps coming up throughout this conversation is investing in what you know, and I will let's use Lulemon as an example. Do you know what I mean? When that first hit the scene and was going crazy, that was definitely isolated in just women's yoga pants. Oh yeah, you know. Analysts, analysts would have been way behind the curve there and that would have been the legs moment of this kind of modern era. And that's a fifty billion dollar company now. Yeah, you can extrapolate that, that out to any number of companies. Yeah, and I often think like we are now in the age of the women's economy, I think it's going to get worse.

Anne Marie: 37:59

It's going to get even bigger. Like they're saying that recession was prevented in America because of the Barbie movie and the Taylor Swift tour of this summer, and so I think it's like women, I think, are better at spending and sometimes they spend and yeah, these discretionary categories, so there are definitely stocks looming there. And now, like Lulemon is having its second age, because men have discovered Lulemon Guys, these pants, these pants are really cool. We should be spending eighty dollars on pants, and so now, now the stock is rallying again because they like to be as big as they are and still bringing in 25 percent sales growth quarter is crazy, but, yeah, I think it's a great way to find businesses. Absolutely, that's great. Ok, before we finish up, I just want to give a quick word from our friends and sponsors of Vodafone business.

Michael O’Mahony: 38:41

So Vodafone have recently launched their V Hub digital advice Service, offering Irish businesses of all sizes free one to one digital support and advice. You don't even have to be a Vodafone business customer to avail of this service. So search Vodafone V Hub to book a call with one of the V Hub digital experts and we will leave a link in the show notes. Right, Amish Amari. Thank you very much, amari. This is a thank you for the last time for a while. So best of good luck for the next few days For the last time for a while. So best of good luck in your travels. And thanks everyone for listening. If you want to get in touch with us, you can get us on Twitter at my Wall Street HQ on Tik Tok on my Wall Street. Simply just email us at pod at mywallstreet.com. If you enjoyed the show and you have a female in your life who you'd like to get invested in, make sure to share it. You can leave us a review on whatever podcast platform you listen to us on. So thanks for joining us today and we will talk to you next week.