Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

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.

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Investing isn't a man's world anymore—and that's a good thing for individual portfolios, Wall Street, and the world's financial system.

Warren Buffett and the women of the world have one thing in common: They are better investors than the average man. Psychologists and scientists have shown that women have the kind of temperaments that help them achieve long-term success in the market. The calamities of the past several 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 and tend to take less risk than men do. This prevents them from chasing "hot" tips and trading on whims. Women are also more likely to seek out information that challenges their assumptions.
• One study found that men trade 45 percent more often than women do, and although men are more confident investors, they are also more susceptible to becoming overconfident. By trading more often—and without enough research—men reduce their net returns and increase transaction costs and capital gains taxes.
• Women aren't as susceptible to peer pressure as men are, which results in a more levelheaded, patient approach to investing.
• Women have less testosterone than men do (not a surprise, we know). New and continually unfolding science points to the possibility that testosterone is responsible for herdlike risk-taking behavior from men in the financial markets.

This book shows that women, with their patience and good decision making, epitomize the Foolish investment philosophy, as well as the investment temperament of the most successful investor in history: Warren Buffett. While men may be brash, compulsive, and overly daring, women tend to be more studious, skeptical, and reasonable. The book will empower and educate women—and the men smart enough to embrace a "feminine" investing style—on how to strengthen their portfolios and find success in the market.

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Warren Buffet Invests Like A Girl

HarperBusiness

Chapter One

Why Temperament Matters Now More Than Ever

September 2008. Britney Spears prepped for a triumphant
return to MTV?s Video Music Awards, following a lackluster
2007 VMA performance. Cyclist Lance Armstrong announced
he?d come out of retirement to compete in the next Tour de
France. Hurricane Ike had become the fifth hurricane of the
Atlantic hurricane season. Delegates at the Republican
National Convention named Arizona senator John McCain as
their candidate for the November presidential elections. Actor
Mickey Rourke was back in the spotlight thanks to the movie
The Wrestler, which picked up the award for best film at the
Venice Film Festival. Roger Federer won an astonishing fifth
consecutive tennis title at the U.S. Open, while Serena

Willliams picked up her third overall, and first since 2002.
British rapper M.I.A. had a hit on her hands with ?Paper Planes,?
as did Atlanta?s own T.I. with ?Whatever You Like.? Fans
of NBC?s The Office eagerly awaited the premiere of the fifth
season to see what kind of hijinks would ensue with Michael
Scott and the rest of the Dunder Mifflin team. The defending
Super Bowl champion New York Giants beat the Washington
Redskins 16?7 in the NFL?s season opener.
Then, less than two weeks into the month, the world
changed. Forever.
A financial panic engulfed stock markets, individual
investors, and world governments alike. And panic was indeed
the perfect word for what happened in the fall of 2008. Writing
in the nineteenth century about market panics, Yale professor
William Graham Sumner defined one as ?a wave of
emotion, apprehension, alarm. It is more or less irrational. It is
super-induced upon a crisis, which is real and inevitable, but it
exaggerates, conjures up possibilities, takes away courage and
energy.?

We?d seen a preview of this madness earlier that same
year, as escalating leverage and a slowing housing market crippled
debt rich companies like investment banking firm Bear
Stearns, which was forced to sell itself under much duress to
JP Morgan (which had the backing and support of the federal
government for the purchase) in March 2008 for a bargain
price. The housing boom, fueled by sub-prime borrowing and
backed by banks and Wall Street companies looking to cash
in on it, began to unravel. And as it did so, it quickly became
clear that the credit markets, and the balance sheets of just
about every bank and financial firm under the sun and moon,
were filled with horrid loads of bad debt. Indeed, it was a ?real
and inevitable? crisis.
Bear Stearns? demise spooked the market and investors
in March. The world then watched as one troubled bank and
hedge fund after another revealed that they, too, were suffering
under the weight of bad loans, leading us limping into
September, when the bankruptcy filing of the storied and debt
laden financial firm Lehman Brothers (the government refused
to step in here as they had with Bear to make sure a sale of
the firm happened) sent the markets over a cliff. The credit
markets, both between businesses and between businesses and
individuals, ground to a halt. No one knew who was hiding
what in their financial statements. No one knew which balance
sheets you could trust, and which you couldn?t. It seemed
safer to assume the worst, and it seems that?s what just about
everybody did.
As one famous sage has said, ?You only learn who has been
swimming naked when the tide goes out.? In the fall of 2008,
Wall Street was a virtual nudist colony. And people, it wasn?t
pretty, as if I need to remind you.
Stock markets dropped dramatically, leaving investors
to hang on for dear life. Volatility was the word of the day,
with the so-called ?fear index? reaching new heights as the
markets reached new lows. Consumer confidence and investor
sentiment plummeted right alongside stock prices. The
very future of the economy was uncertain from one minute
to the next, with one established financial company after
another at a precipice, dangling over the edge, not sure what
was ahead.
Hello, panic.
By October 6, 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
fell below 10,000 points for the first time since 2004. Three
days later, it would drop below 8,600. That same day, October
9, the Standard & Poor?s 500 index (which tracks 500 of the
largest companies in the United States) marked a 42 percent
decline over the past year, easily wiping away gains that had
taken years to build. This milestone came less than four short,
painful weeks after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.
It was a time that tested the mettle and tried the nerves
of even the most seasoned investor. I watched, wide-eyed and
with no small amount of horror, as my portfolio (containing,
in some cases, shares of companies I?d owned for more than
ten years) shrank to just a wisp of itself. How low could it
ultimately go? Well-run companies that had nothing to do with
the banks? or financial institutions? troubles were slaughtered
right alongside them. You would have thought popular
consumer brand and retail companies had suddenly started
dabbling in mortgage backed securities versus selling their soft
drinks and leggings.
Flipping on the television each morning became an act of
desperation and adventure, in a strange sense. I felt compelled
to look, to see what had happened overnight, to see what new
fresh awful thing was going to be inflicted on us that day. To
compare it to a car wreck, where you honestly don?t want to
look because you fear what you?ll see, but you seem unable not
to, is apt.
Only in this case, there?s a crucial difference: We were all
in this car together as it crashed, leaving us in a mangled heap.
The hair-raising drops and sheer panic had breathless
commentators struggling to keep up. News was breaking so
fast, it was nearly impossible to know the latest, most up-to-
date information. Important people in fancy cars and fancier
suits in places like Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and London
were coming and going from meetings, their entries and exits
broadcast on television as if they were celebrities. (Meanwhile,
Britney did just fine at the VMAs, second time around, thank
you very much.)
Through it all, a man sat far removed from the hubbub
of New York City and Washington, D.C., in the Midwest, in
quiet, placid Omaha, Nebraska. He watched, as he?d watched
so many times before, as the world was seemingly coming to
an end. He heard the shrill voices on TV and even he probably
couldn?t escape the daily, even hourly, deluge of photographs
of Wall Street traders looking horrified, frazzled, or just plain
resigned to it all.
Then, he did what any rational person should have done in
the face of so much fear. He took a deep breath, steadied himself,
and started buying stocks, putting $20 billion to work in
companies like Goldman Sachs and General Electric. It took
courage, fortitude, and an ability to look past the current crisis
...