Khris:
To prove that I'm not all hormones, I'd like to ask you or any of the other women out there a serious question. It seems to me that the discussions we've been having about the charms of the lovely Ms. Bartiromo, in a strange way, highlight some very critical differences in the way men and women view money. I think most men perceive money and business as another field of competition. With no wooly mammoth to chase down and supply food, we modern men now "chase" great investment ideas, hunt them down so that we can make a "killing." I think for most men, myself included, money becomes an extension of our identity, our machismo, and symbolically of our potence and virility. Not surpirsingly, we watch CNBC as part of this hunt and daily quest to define our machismo and self-worth, monetarily and emotionally. As a beutiful women, Maria is our companion in this daily battle and becomes our surrogate girlfriend/wife in the uncertainty and chaos of the market. In the same way that the G.I.'s carry around "cheesecake" photos of Betty Grable in their wallets during WWII, we latch on to Maria and celebrate her beauty.
For you CNBC wonks,I'm sorry for getting this far off topic, but what the hell if you guys can debate politics, I see no reason why I can't indulge my psychobabble. I've only began posting quite recently, but have been lurking on the SI threads for more than a year now. And I've seen some interesting trading/posting patterns related to gender and sexuality. The most aggressive traders out there seem to be young men. They are truly promiscuous and get in and out of a stock with reckless abandon. They seem to use technical analysis more, analyzing a stock's up and downs the way they view young women's curves and pounce whenever they feel those curves are giving them the right signal. Older guys tend to be more patient with stocks, they want to hear the story and learn all about the fundamentals. Older guys appear to be more willing and stick with a stock for months and years. They make a long-term commitment to these securities by putting them in IRAs and DRIPs.
From what I've seen on these threads, women tend to be very cautious with money. They seem to ask a lot of questions and find out everything about a stock before they get in. Even when they get in a stock, they seem to be more tentative then men, always opening with a small position in a security and then gradually expanding their holdings if it is holding up well. When bad news happens and a stock craters, I've never seen a post where a women expresses her frustrations by dumping all of stock and moving on to the next conquest the way men will do. Women will tend to standby a poorly performing stock and almost try to nurture it back to its 200 day moving average. I'm sorry if all of this sounds too much like a Jerry Seinfeld monologue "men hunt, women roost," but all joking aside, I think some of our "irrational exuberance" about Maria can be partially explained by these ideas.
P.S. I can assure you as a partner with an LBO firm, who trades very actively on his own account, I am very much in the most desired demographics for CNBC's target audience
P.P.S. You should never let the names attached to the postings fool you, I am not Canadian and live as far away from Calgary as you can get in North America. |
