How to be a better investor

Male or female, we could all benefit from treating investing as a necessary chore, rather than an exciting gamble, says John Stepek.

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Investing: it shouldn't be too interesting
(Image credit: Credit: dpa picture alliance archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

Are women really better investors than men? Another new study, this time from Warwick Business School, suggests they might be. The study put together data from nearly 3,000 investors who had stockbroking accounts with Barclays. It turns out that over a period of three years (from 2012 to 2015), women investors managed to beat the FTSE 100 by 1.94% a year, while men barely matched it (outperforming by 0.14% a year). You can spend time picking holes in methodologies or questioning the representativeness of the sample (in using data from stockbroker accounts, for example, you can really only draw conclusions about men and women who are explicitly engaged in investing, rather than the general population). But this finding isn't unusual similar bits of research come along regularly.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.