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Individual #investors pulled $20 million from #Fisher Investments following billionaire’s #sexist comments #womeninvest

Though retail investors have largely remained, public pension plans said they are divesting more than $3 billion in the weeks following Fisher’s comments.


Individual investors at Fisher Investments transferred $20 million from the firm the week after the billionaire made lewd comments at a conference, according to a research note from Mercer, an advisor to institutional investors.

The development was disclosed on a conference call Fisher executives held on Oct. 14 with Mercer, to discuss the fallout from founder Ken Fisher’s comments at the Tiburon CEO Summit, according to the note obtained by CNBC.

When speaking at the conference on Oct. 8, Fisher had likened winning new clients to picking up women at a bar. He had used similar language at another conference in 2018.

Though the billionaire apologized, institutional investors — including seven government pensions — reacted quickly.

www.cnbc.com
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Billionaire #Buffett says women's place is in investing

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Saturday that women ought to have a higher profile in investing.


On the sidelines of the annual shareholders meeting of his Berkshire Hathaway empire in Omaha, Buffett made a surprise appearance at a gathering called Variant Perspectives, organized by a group of women financial professionals aiming to end the imbalance.

"It's long overdue," Buffet said of the goal.

"When someone calls me from the outside with an investment idea, I'm not going to ask what their sex is; it wouldn't make a difference," he added, stressing that: "The stock doesn't know who owns it."

Only three percent of investment funds in the United States are owned by women, according to Variant Perspectives.

www.france24.com
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JP Morgan just promoted 117 people to Wall Street’s top rank, including a record number of women #Chase

Of this year’s incoming class of managing directors, 26% were women, up from 18% last year, according to a person with knowledge of the figures.


J.P. Morgan Chase’s Wall Street division just promoted 117 people to its highest rank of managing director, and a record number of women earned the title.

Of this year’s incoming class of managing directors, 26% were women, up from 18% last year, according to a person with knowledge of the figures. Of these 30 women, seven made use of the bank’s maternity leave policy in the past two years, the person said.

Bank CEOs from J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon to Goldman Sachs head David Solomon have said that hiring and promoting women and minorities are priorities for their trading and advisory businesses, which are still dominated by men, especially at senior levels.

For instance, last month Goldman expanded a year-old program to hire more junior bankers from underrepresented groups. By aiming for half of all new analysts and entry-level associates hired in the U.S. to be women, 11 percent black, and 14 percent Latino, the bank hopes that more women and minorities will eventually make it to the firm’s senior roles.

www.cnbc.com
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Do women really make better investors than men?

Although fewer females are in the stockmarket, numerous studies suggest they outperform on returns


Plenty of articles have been written bemoaning the fact that women are less likely to invest in the stock market than men. However, several recent studies suggest that women who do take the plunge outperform men when it comes to investment returns.

So what is the evidence — and what exactly are female investors doing to gain the edge over men?

Warwick Business School conducted a study of 2,800 UK men and women investing with Barclays’ Smart Investor, tracking their performance over three years. Not only did the women that were examined outperform the FTSE 100 over the time period, they also achieved better returns than their male counterparts.

The men in Warwick’s study managed an average annual return 0.14 per cent higher than the FTSE 100, but women outperformed the benchmark by 1.94 per cent, beating men by 1.8 per cent.

A separate study by Hargreaves Lansdown, the UK’s biggest consumer investment platform, also found that women investors had the edge, returning on average 0.81 per cent more than men over a three-year period. Hargreaves points out that if this pattern were to continue for 30 years, the average woman would end up with a portfolio worth 25 per cent more than the average man.

www.ft.com
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These investments aim to push for workplace diversity and gender-pay equity

If you want to invest in companies based on how well they integrate women, there are funds that follow that strategy.


If you want to see a better gender balance in the workforce, you may want to consider putting your money where your mouth is.

Enter gender and diversity funds, which screen for certain characteristics — such as women in leadership — and let you back companies that share those priorities.

These are funds that seek to make a measurable impact, alongside financial return, by investing in companies with a record of measuring and improving workplace diversity and equal pay for equal work.

Among U.S. asset managers, there are 15 funds — exchange-traded funds and mutuals — that fall into the gender and diversity sustainable investing category, according to investment research company Morningstar.

www.cnbc.com
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Tips From Wall Street Trader Lauren Simmons

At 23, Lauren Simmons became the second-ever African American woman stock trader at the NYSE.


AT 23, LAUREN SIMMONS made her mark on history – literally and figuratively. She signed her name into the leather-bound tome containing the constitution of the New York Stock Exchange, becoming the youngest and only female trader at the NYSE at the time. But this wasn't all Simmons became that day.

As she stepped back from the marble-topped table after adding her name to a list containing the likes of Rockefeller and Vanderbilt, the NYSE archivist stepped forward. Simmons, the archivist said, was the second-ever African American woman to sign her name to the book. In the 226-year history of the NYSE, there had been only one other African American woman trader.

Suddenly Simmons' accomplishment felt as bitter as it was sweet. "I was very excited, but also disappointed that in 226 years, I was only the second," she says.

It's a title that's come to define her. Even now that she has left the trading floor, being the second-ever African American woman to break the white ceiling of the NYSE has turned her into an icon.

money.usnews.com
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To Help Boost Female-led Startups, More Women Join Investor Ranks

Giving more women the ability to influence which startups get money helps get more women funding


Houston — Men have long leveraged their networks to succeed in business, and the tech industry has been no exception. Women, finding themselves outside of the club, are now creating their own networks to do the same.

Katelyn O’Shaughnessy already had a solid track record, selling TripScope, a travel startup she co-founded in 2013, to Travefy two years ago. But when looking for funding for her second company, Doctours, she says, “I kept hearing, ‘I love your idea, but I’m not sure about you being CEO.’ ” The investors O’Shaughnessy was pitching didn’t believe she fit the profile of what they considered a tech founder, she says.

Laura Wagner, co-founder and chief vision officer of electronic payments startup Digitzs, who is also based in Los Angeles, says she faced similar skepticism from the venture community—even with some heavy-hitters on the startup’s board of directors, including chairman David Jacques, PayPal’s first CFO.

www.xconomy.com
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Rich women increasingly call the shots, wealth heads say

Women control $14 trillion of assets in the U.S., but they're underserved by financial advisers, says Merrill's Sieg


Rich women mean big business for some of the world's largest wealth managers.

Women control about $14 trillion in assets in the U.S., which is comparable to the gross domestic products of China and India combined — and they're underserved by financial advisers, said Andy Sieg, president of Bank of America Corp.'s Merrill Lynch Wealth Management unit.

The industry needs to hone its services to reflect the growing power of female clients, said Shelley O'Connor, co-head of wealth management at Morgan Stanley.

"It's so important that firms listen to what women want," while also increasing diversity among their advisers and branch managers, Ms. O'Connor said at a conference Thursday in Naples, Fla. "The success of wealth management in the years ahead depends on making sure we all look like the clients and communities we serve."

www.investmentnews.com
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Serena Williams Just Revealed That She’s Been Secretly Investing In Women for 5 Years #SerenaWilliams

Serena Williams just shared a long kept secret on Instagram.


She has been investing in women and diverse companies for the past 5 years.

The tennis champ revealed Wednesday that she launched her own investing fund, Serena Ventures, in 2014. “Yes, I know I can keep a secret,” she said in the post. “We have so many exciting things coming up!” Her fund focuses on early-stage companies that embrace “diverse leadership [and] individual empowerment” and look for creative new ways to address age-old problems.

In the past 5 years, the professional athlete shared (in a second Instagram photo) that she has invested in over 20 companies, ranging from Billie, a razor subscription company for women, to Brandless, an online retailer of everyday items without big brand names, to Lola, a reproductive health subscription company.

www.thestoryexchange.org
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‘Investing in themselves’: Single female homeownership is booming in New Orleans

Kayci Dickerson knew early on that she would never pay rent.


Dickerson, who grew up in St. Rose, watched as her friends cycled in and out of apartments in the city and suburbs. They spent way too much money on lackluster places, she thought. They dealt with absentee landlords. “It seemed like they were trapped,” Dickerson said.

She chose another route. She stayed with her parents and worked, at one point holding down two jobs as a Walgreens manager and TSA officer. She picked up extra hours and weekends whenever she could. She socked away one salary, and spent frugally with the other. At 29, she purchased her first home, a new-build, three-bedroom ranch home in a quiet Marrero development. It was tough, but it was important to her.

For a long time, homeownership has been seen as a rite of passage after getting married. That was the case for Dickerson’s parents. Many of her friends expect the same. That didn’t sit right with Dickerson.

If you can buy a home by yourself, she asked, why wait? Dickerson’s story isn’t conventional, but it’s increasingly common, and nowhere more so than in New Orleans.

Single women are now the country’s second largest group of homebuyers, buying up property at twice the rate of single men, according to data from the National Association of Realtors. That’s due in part to millennial women buying their first homes. But young Baby Boomer women are even more apt to jump into the market solo. In 2018, one in four buyers ages 54 to 63 were women, NAR reports.

www.nola.com
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Here's how I taught my daughter to invest like a pro

Women are hard-wired with the traits that make excellent investors. It’s a shame most of us express a lack of confidence in money matters.


Here’s what women and their daughters need to remember:

Don’t pass on your financial decisions UBS, in a recent study, measured the percentage of women “deferring” investment and financial decisions to their husbands. Deferring is rampant among women of all ages but especially among younger ones. Fifty-nine percent of women ages 20 to 34 leave financial matters to their spouses. This is higher than the 55% of women at least 51 years old who defer to their husbands. The trends are worsening, rather than improving.

Women have good investing instincts

The research demonstrates that women make better investors than men. We do more research, trade less and process multiple data points effectively between our left and right brain hemispheres. Important traits for investing. Why then do we excuse ourselves from the conversation?

www.usatoday.com
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Meet The Top Women Investors Of The Midas List In 2019 #MidasList

Globally, only about 17% of investment-level positions at venture firms are held by women, according to PitchBook data this year.


Women are still a minority among the most successful venture capital investors, but their presence is growing. Twelve female investors made it onto this year’s Midas List, a record for the annual ranking and an increase from nine women a year ago. The cohort includes three female newcomers, one of whom, Kathy Xu, is the highest-ranked woman on the list.

The Midas List ranks venture capital investors based on the number and dollar size of exits and highly-valued private companies over the past five years, with a premium on bolder early-stage deals. Produced in partnership with TrueBridge Capital Partners, the ranking counts only exits (public offerings or acquisitions) that are over $200 million or private investment rounds valuing companies at $400 million or more.

Newcomer Kathy Xu, founder and partner at Shanghai-based firm Capital Today, joins the list at the very lofty No. 6 spot, thanks largely to her prescient bet on JD.com, China’s No. 2 online retailer, plus investments in Chinese gaming company NetEase and discount e-commerce site Meituan-Dianping. Capital Today was just a year old when Xu bet on JD.com as its only Series A investor. After the e-commerce site went public in 2015, she had a career-making win. Her $18 million check returned $2.9 billion to Capital Today and its investors. Xu began her career as a bank clerk in China, then worked at Hong Kong investment firm Peregrine and Baring Private Equity Asia before founding Capital Today in 2005.

www.forbes.com
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Enough mansplaining: women tackle gender investment gap #genderinvestmentgap

"It's important you have somebody across the table you can relate to," summed up Janet Cowell, CEO of Girls Who Invest.


As a professional woman in her late 30s, Kate Packard was keen to start investing. Like many novices, her enthusiasm took a knock when she hit a wall of impenetrable jargon -- and was all but killed off by "mansplaining" from the men around her.

"They'll be like, 'Money is green! And it's paper!'" said the strategic communications manager from Sterling, Virginia. "Yes, thanks, I can get there on my own."

To do so, the 38-year-old turned to one of a growing number of groups run by women, for women -- to help bridge the gender gap when it comes to investment.

Women are significantly less likely to invest in the market than men: based on studies from 2016 and 2017, the micro-investing app Acorns found 57 percent of women don't invest at all, versus 44 percent of men.

Over a lifetime, that can translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income -- and can hit particularly hard in countries like the United States, where wise investment can make the difference between hardship and comfort in retirement.

www.dailymail.co.uk
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How Women Will Make History at Warren Buffett's 2019 Berkshire Hathaway Weekend

Today it appears that conversations about gender bias in investing are reaching a tipping point.


At last year’s Berkshire Hathaway meeting in Omaha, three women met and wondered out loud why female investors were so underrepresented in the conferences and meetings of one of the premier investing events of the year.

But it wasn’t just in Omaha that female investors were missing at the table. At a time when women are making substantive progress in many fields, two statistics underscore the problems faced by female-owned investment companies. First reported in a landmark study by the Knight Foundation “Ownership Diversity in the Asset Management Industry” these are:

Among all investment companies operating in the U.S, only about three percent are owned by women. The total value of Assets Under Management (AUM) controlled by female investors, represents only one percent of all U.S. investment company AUM. So Kim Shannon, the founder and CEO of Sionna Investment Management, LJ Rittenhouse, Berkshire author, financial analyst and inventor of Candor AnalyticsTM and Barbara Ann Bernard, the founder and CEO of Wincrest Capital, decided to do something.

To raise awareness about the gender bias gap in the investment sector – possibly one of the biggest (and most ignored) gaps in business – we would host the Variant Perspectives Conference in Omaha around the 2019 Berkshire Hathaway meeting weekend and explain why this gap persists. We would present the case for growing AUFM: Assets Under Female Management.

www.forbes.com
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The Single Woman’s Investment Guide

Investing early and often is even more important for single women who have only themselves to depend on.


Go confidently into your investing future.

Single women face a lot of financial challenges. Chief among them is overcoming the investing confidence gap, the divide between how confident women investors are compared to men. Their lack of confidence often prevents women from investing. Over time, this “can cost you even more than the more notorious gender pay gap,” says Shelly-Ann Eweka, a wealth management director with TIAA in Denver. “Unlike the latter, this one is totally in our hands, because boosting your confidence level requires nothing more than a bit of effort.” To that end, here is your Single Woman’s Investment Guide: 12 investing tips to help you invest better and braver.

money.usnews.com
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Women Who Tech founder: Investors ‘are leaving billions’ behind by not funding women-led startups #WomenWhoTech

“VCs need to actually stick to their commitments of diversifying their portfolios” because “the reality is that it's not happening.”


Venture capitalists (VCs) are leaving “billions of dollars on the table behind by not funding women-led startups,” Allyson Kapin, Founder of Women Who Tech, recently told The First Trade.

Last year, women-led startups received 2.2% of $130 billion in VC funding, according to data collected from PitchBook. That percentage has stalled since 2017.

About 86 to 90% of investor money worldwide is going to startups founded by men, according to Crunchbase.

“The investor community needs to come in. They need to start funding women-led startups,” Kapin said. “In the last two years, we have seen all of the major VCs come out and admit that this is a problem that they are having a pipeline issue. And they have made all sorts of pledges, diversity pledges, that they were going to start increasing their diversity in their portfolios. But we are not seeing that.”

finance.yahoo.com
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Elvie raises $42M to become the go-to destination for women’s health

Under Boler’s fearless leadership, Elvie has raised nearly $50 million and started a much-needed conversation around women’s issues, like pelvic floor health and public breastfeeding.


Elvie, the developer of femtech hardware including a silent wearable breast pump and a smart pelvic floor exerciser, is one of the boldest startups around.

Led by co-founder and chief executive officer Tania Boler, the London-based business has successfully infiltrated the bro-y community of venture capitalists, which has historically shied away from the “unrelatable” and “niche” sector that is women’s health. Of course, that sector isn’t niche at all, the global women’s health market is expected to be worth $51.3 billion by 2025, but investors have only recently begun to accept that reality.

Elvie is today announcing its third private financing, a $42 million Series B led by IPGL to support the release of four additional women’s health products. Octopus Ventures and Impact Ventures U.K. have also participated in the round.

Six-year-old Elvie is led by Boler and co-founder Alexander Asseily, a hardware vet and co-founder of the consumer electronics business Jawbone, which despite its many struggles, managed to get VCs to cough up hundreds of millions of dollars before it folded. Boler’s expertise in the space — she has a Ph.D. in sexual health — and Asseily’s hardware prowess have undoubtedly lured investors, as has Elvie’s breast pump, launched in September, which boasts a waitlist of thousands of women.

www.techcrunch.com
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When Will We See More Gender Equality in Investing? #GenderEquality

  • Firms with capable young women should offer more flexibility through the years in which they need that option.
  • Because there are so few female role models available, firms need to invest in more mentoring programs for women.


    • In many spheres, such as politics, media and entertainment, women have made considerable progress in reaching executive leadership positions, achieving higher pay, and building new enterprises. But this ascent hasn’t been achieved everywhere. In my own industry, investing, progress has been painfully slow.

    Aside from professional sports, the investment business — encompassing investment management, mutual, hedge, private equity, and venture capital funds — might have the lowest percentage of women at the top of the pyramid (at 4%). And women only control between 1% and 3.5% of assets under management, depending on specific class.

    The lack of women leaders in investing is an issue that more firms should be worried about. Research shows that gender diversity at the top is connected to positive returns. And aside from financial performance, retaining and promoting more women in a field is the only way to ensure that promising talent isn’t being lost or shuffled out of the industry.

    www.hbr.org
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    The firm behind Wall Street’s Fearless Girl statue isn’t as pro-woman as it could be #StateStreet #FearlessGirl

    The Fearless Girl is an empty marketing ploy masquerading as female empowerment.


    The firm behind the “Fearless Girl” statue on Wall Street isn’t as into gender diversity as it claims, at least according to one measure.

    The investment management company State Street Corporation has positioned itself as an advocate for women and gender diversity in corporate America in recent years. In 2016, State Street launched an investment fund devoted to gender-diverse companies, and the following year, it placed a statue of the Fearless Girl staring down the Charging Bull in New York City’s Financial District. (The Fearless Girl statue has since moved to across from the New York Stock Exchange a couple of blocks away.)

    But according to a new report from the investment research company Morningstar, State Street might not be putting its money — or rather, its shareholder votes — where its mouth is on promoting women in the upper echelons of corporations.

    Of the 10 times its gender diversity fund used its shareholder votes to weigh in on a gender diversity or pay equity proposal for one of the companies it invests in over a three-year period, the fund only voted in favor of the proposal twice. Six times, it voted against the proposal, and twice, it abstained. Morningstar compared it to two other gender-focused funds, the Glenmede Women in Leadership US Equity Portfolio and the Pax Ellevate Global Women’s Leadership Fund, which voted for diversity and pay equity proposals every time.

    www.vox.com
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    3 Retirement Challenges Facing Women Investors

    Here’s what you can do to address them.


    Today, women have more choices than before – from career and leadership opportunities to raising a family or pursuing passions. But, balancing daily life with planning for the future can be challenging, especially when the deck is slightly stacked against us.

    Here are three retirement challenges facing women investors, and ways to address them.

    1. Impact of pay gap and time away from work. It's important for everyone to invest early and often, but for women the need is even more so. This is due to two main factors: the pay gap and time spent away from the workforce. The pay gap still stands at 20 percent in 2017 according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research and will likely persist for some time. What's more, the pay gap is often magnified as women are pulled away from work to care for loved ones – be it children, aging parents, an ill spouse or grandkids.

    Time away from work impacts earnings not just in real time, but throughout one's career. The Center for American Progress found that each year out of work can cost a family more than three times the parent's annual salary in lifetime income. Additionally, time out of the workforce often means giving up important retirement benefits like access to a 401(k) and the associated employer match.

    money.usnews.com
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