This panel was spontaneously recorded after the “Woman in Value Investing Conference” in the week of the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. In the panel Laura Rittenhouse, Bob Robotti, Danielle Town and Vishal Mishra discuss the current state and opportunities of increasing engagement of woman in the investing industry.
Danielle Town, Bob Robotti, Laura Rittenhouse & Vishal Mishra Discuss Are women better investors?
Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
Transcript
So Danielle can you add what made you come to this because she was speaking at the conference so the food was wonderful. She was on our call to action panel. What. What do you think. I'm going to then speak to Mr. Bob through a body. But but what do you think. What do you hope was gained from this conference.
I think the conference was about women understanding first of all the ways that we are literally held back in real life by simply being a woman in the world of finance. I think the conference was also about understanding that men and women really have a part to play in making these changes and getting more assets under female management. So first of all women. Have the same or better abilities in investing as men. And this is my first question was do we have any stats on that. And it turns out we do. There's the hedge fund index which has a subsection which is the women's Hedge Fund Index and the women's hedge fund index has actually outperformed the overall hedge fund index by I believe four point three percent. Which is considerable in the world of investing. So women. Are not worse at investing than men they're actually better based on that stat. Secondly how do we help women get more assets under management. Well with those kinds of results it has to be a bias. There's no other explanation for it. So I think one thing that came out of this for me was that each of us within our own spheres of influence within our own worlds our own jobs our own families even we can support women to become comfortable around money. To start taking action and ownership over money and have more power over the results of our money and as we do that this is steadily going to change.
So this is a. So these are profound. This is a profound time and I think we've been so fortunate to leverage the excitement and the visibility of the Berkshire Hathaway meeting to advance this and for the people just tuning into this YouTube. Our conference was kicked off by none other than Warren Buffett. And when I asked him. What do you think about an all female investing conference he replied. Way overdue. And then he elaborated. But I'd like to hear what Mr. Barbara body has to say about this and by the way in a sense Bob is the father of this. I don't know if he wants to claim paternity but he's he's certainly planted the seed. Of two years ago. Bob took it upon. You can tell us what you do and and why. Two years ago you decided to host a panel meeting of female investors.
Hi I'm Barbara body everybody in company advisors. It was actually four years ago Stephanie boss is a person who's was with me and said gee there's really no women events and women are significantly in the represented. And of course that's what we're looking for is undervalued investments and what what is the what's the crowd ignoring and where's the opportunity. Clearly there's a huge opportunity. And so to be where everyone is not something that was a great opportunity for us to to piggyback on that. So you know the idea of women as investors especially as value investors intuitively to me does seem to make sense. You know you mentioned it in the talk today and that is the way women's brains are wired you know to buy and hold and instead of being reactive which men tend to be you know probably men generally are not good long term buy and hold kind of investors and women are better wired for that. So the idea that they're not here they run the representative through that is an investment. I do think there's one thing that we did talk about here a lot. Mr. Buffett of course it's a value versus growth and of course it is unfortunate that we do talk about men versus women because it really should be about investors. And so therefore to think about it without regard to that sex part is important. Of course it you know that's the you can't then ignore that there's a significant underrepresentation. So there's the symbol and and what I had today really I came away with his raising consciousness is so important. I really do think because my experiences as an owner of a business 34 years I never get resumes from women looking for internships. I always get them from men. So there really is something kind of earlier on to get women to think about it differently. And so that was the one takeaway I had is you know I'm a trustee of a 200 person girls school in New York City. And the idea of hosting an event try to get people at that level at a younger age to think broadly about investing is an opportunity for them as a career. So you know that was a great take.
