Warren Buffett Invests Like a Girl: And Why You Should, Too: 8 Essential Principles Every Investor Needs to Create a Profitable Portfolio

by Louann Lofton, Tom Gardner (Foreword by)

Overview

*** Wall Street Journal bestseller ***

Investing isn’t a man’s world anymore—and this provocative and enlightening book shows why that’s a good thing for Wall Street, the global financial system, and your own personal portfolio.

Warren Buffett and all of the women of the world have one thing in common: They are better investors than the average man. It’s been proved by psychologists and scientists, and the market calamities of the past two years have only provided more statistical and anecdotal evidence of the same. Here are just a few characteristics of female investors that distinguish them from their male counterparts.

• Women spend more time researching their investment choices than men do. This prevents them from chasing “hot” tips and trading on whims -- behavior that tends to weaken men’s portfolios.

• Men trade 45% more often than women do, and although men are more confident investors, they tend to be overconfident. By trading more often -- and without enough research -- men reduce their net returns. But by trading less often, women get better returns and also save on transaction costs and capital gains taxes.

• A study by the University of California at Davis found that women’s portfolios gained 1.4% more than men’s portfolios did. What’s more, single women did even better than single men, with 2.3% greater gains.

• Women tend to look at more than just numbers when deciding whether to invest in a company. They invest in companies they feel good about ethically and personally. And companies with good products, good services, and ethics tend to have better long-term prospects -- and face fewer lawsuits.

Women, with their capability for patience and good decision-making, epitomize the Foolish investment philosophy and the investment practices of the most successful investor in history: Warren Buffett. While men are brash, compulsive, and overly daring, women tend to be more studious, skeptical, and reasonable. This indispensable volume from the multimedia financial education company Motley Fool offers essential advice for every investor hoping to turn today’s savings into wealth for a better tomorrow.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062092250
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	277
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Tom Gardner, along with his brother David, cofounded The Motley Fool, a multimedia financial education company, in 1993. They have coauthored five books and oversee the award-winning website Fool.com (with approximately five million unique visitors per month); a nationally syndicated newspaper column, carried by over two hundred papers; and fourteen premium investing services.

LouAnn Lofton has been with The Motley Fool since January 2000, first as a writer, then as the managing editor for online content. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Editorial Reviews

As investors, men can't hold a proverbial candle to women. Studies show that when it comes to making portfolio choices, men are confident, impulsive, and overly daring; while women tend to be more studious, skeptical, reasonable, and patient. They trade less than men, but do better financially. So how can you learn to invest like a girl)? This trustworthy Motley Fool guide present eight essential principles to change your bullish male impulses into investment strategies that Warren Buffett and wise women can endorse.

In this uneven primer on creating a successful long-term portfolio, Lofton, a Motley Fool writer and editor, draws on Warren Buffett's wisdom and takes on the male-dominated world of investing. She cites research on gender differences in investing that suggests men's high testosterone levels makes them naturally aggressive traders, but can render them "overconfident" and prone to recklessness. Conversely, women's natural tendency to "dig deeper, analyze more information and details" makes them more likely to outperform over the long term. While her propositions are intriguing, Lofton offers little evidence supporting her claims. After the first two rousing chapters on gender differences (buttressed by only a handful of studies), she awkwardly turns to focus on Buffett's eight investment principles and links them—tenuously—to her premise. Her unproven arguments on gender, risk, and money are abandoned as she moves exclusively into a hagiography of the "Oracle of Omaha." This could have been a solid investment basics book in its own right; it suffers from its provocative packaging. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Their Panache is a cover for a belief in the old-fashioned virtues of patience, simplicity, and prudence.

U.S. News & World Report

The best place online for talking with investors... amusing as well as educational.

Barron's

They’ve built up a large and much-deserved following.

Washington Post

Lofton cites research that finds female investors tend to trade less, shun risk, and perform more research than male investors. She also argues that Warren Buffett's value-investing style is more feminine than masculine and well worth emulating. Lofton has three hooks here: applauding women investors for their reasonable temperaments; structuring chapters around anecdotes of superstar Buffett's many successes; and making frequent references to The Motley Fool (www.fool.com), of which she is managing editor (cofounder Tom Gardner provides a foreword). Her book is an easy read but not a particularly helpful one—most readers enthralled with Buffett already know about his dedication to companies he understands, his buy-and-hold strategy, and his dependence on reading and research, all of which is simply rehashed here. VERDICT The appendixes, containing interviews with value-investing practitioners, are interesting, but readers serious about learning the nitty-gritty of Buffett's style might be better served by a title like Vahan Janjigian's Even Buffett Isn't Perfect.—Sarah Statz Cords, The Reader's Advisor Online

Library Journal

A debut author impugns Warren Buffett's masculinity—in a good way—and asserts that feminine thinking like his is what leads to investment riches.

Lofton, a managing editor at The Motley Fool, ascribes investor rashness and hubris to roaring male testosterone. Of course, this isn't a problem for innately conservative, deliberate and never ruinously overconfident female investors—or, for that matter, the great sage Buffett who, as the title of this book would have readers believe, invests like a girl. This means, among other things, standing by your stocks during downturns and not bolting for the exit like the typical hair-trigger male investor. Mover-and-shaker investors, if they are men, may and often do feel that they are geniuses until proven idiots; women, with Buffett-like humility learned over the millennia, are less likely to fall into this trap. The same could be said of Buffett, who famously remarked that if he had an IQ of 160, he would sell 40 points. Lest it appear that Lofton is merely expressing gender pride, she touches up her arguments with statistics and a pop-psychology veneer and ends with a series of interviews with a sampling of top female investors. Thankfully, the narrative tails off before delving deeper into errant male responsibility for much of what threatens humanity, including war and global warming.

Lofton lays out sound feminine and Motley Fool–worthy rules for investment that men would be wise to heed—sure to be more popular with women than men.

Kirkus Reviews