When Bev Sutton and her husband were splitting up in the mid-1970s, she did something that some might see as a little unconventional.
“I said, ‘I’ll take the stock if you want to keep the house.’ That was fine with him, and that’s what I did.”
If you tend to think most women just don’t get involved with investing, you’d best think again. As a female investor who has been doing it on her own for several decades, Sutton is quick to point out: “Not everyone fits the stereotype!”
And it’s true: the image of the woman too timid to get into finance is just that – a stereotype. There are plenty of women out there doing their own investing, especially now that exchange traded funds (ETFs) have made it even easier.
Wachovia Bank’s third annual fitness survey of 2008 revealed that only 30% of women track and manage their retirement assets, compared to 58% of men. The same study revealed that 17% of women make investment decisions, compared with 49% of men.
But female investors are rapidly on the rise, and they’re breaking the conventional mold: they’re not conservative, they’re making their own decisions and they’re taking their futures in their own hands.
Sutton, a retiree in San Francisco, describes herself as self-taught. After her divorce, she stepped into mutual funds. One of her first investments was in a Magellan fund at Fidelity, a company she is still with today.
Recently, she branched out into ETFs. “Mainly, I watch the charts. After you’ve been doing it quite awhile, you get a feel for where some ETFs are probably going to go.”
Getting in can be easy, but getting out is a little less fun. Sutton has her own stop-losses in place, but doesn’t particularly like to use them.
“As soon as you sell, it goes up. But I’ve found that if you don’t, you don’t protect the downside, either.”
Like many investors stung by the recent price spikes in the energy sector, Sutton has her eye on alternative energy. “To me, that’s where things are going to have to go.”
For retired investors, the standard advice given is to move toward a more conservative portfolio, but Sutton is bucking that trend. “I don’t care much for bonds. I don’t understand them very well, and it’s not what I’m interested in.”
To be sure, though, she still wants to make money – even though the markets have been challenged lately. And because of her status as a self-taught investor, she finds that her approach keeps changing. But in this environment, she picks at different areas because “it’s difficult to really know which way things are going.”
Jennifer Walters, who has homes in both Atlanta and Florida, has been “playing” since 1992 and learning as she goes. She and her husband have a joint portfolio, and Walters has her own separate one where she can try different tactics and strategies without worrying that she’s doing any damage.
“The market is very interesting to me, I learn something all the time and I enjoy it,” she says.
Her portfolio isn’t entirely made up of ETFs, but she’s been gradually incorporating them more after her broker put her into two of them – the Cubes and the Diamonds. “I thought, ‘This is neat,’ and it got me interested in learning more.”
Walters particularly enjoys the ability of ETFs to allow investors to jump in with lower risk than there would be with picking individual stocks.
She’s done well, she says, and is down about 6% this summer. In the last three months, the S&P is down 9.4%. “I’m feeling pretty confident,” Walters says, “And I have ETFs to thank for diversifying me.”
One investor we spoke with, a professional market researcher and analyst, got into ETFs only four months ago after her fund manager realized they couldn’t handle her funds and told her she’d have to take it over herself. She dove into the markets without hesitation.
Through the research she does in her job, she became aware of ETFs. So far, her results have been mixed. “It’s a very difficult market to secure the kind of performance we’d all like to see.”
When she initially started, she said she tended toward emerging markets, but “those are ones that have been badly hit. I think, frankly, that I got in at the wrong time. Longer-term, I think they’re good holds.”
While the markets remain iffy, she says she’ll just wait until she sees a more significant turnaround.
She’s still working on strategies, but for now, she reviews on a six-month basis by asking herself some questions: “Is this where I am? Is it worth taking a cut and getting out? Do I hang on and hope for a turnaround?”