Tradenet Reports an Uptick in Women Day Trading Students

Tradenet Reports an Uptick in Women Day Trading Students

If you grew up in the nineties, eighties, or any decade before that, you must remember one repetitive scene you could find in any film somehow related to finance. It took place on the stock exchange floor. The exchange floor, before having been all but depleted by computers, was the place where traders in button-down shirts, ties, and vests displaying their firm’s name were shouting orders at each other, sweating, and swearing. What did all these trading-floor traders have in common? They were all men. And guess what? Decades later, it seems to many that stock trading is just for men.

Well, that has been changing recently, according to Tradenet, one of the world’s largest providers of stock day trading education. In a call with Meir Barak, Tradenet’s founder and a leader of a big trading community in a live trading room, he shares with us some recent findings, according to Tradenet’s internal statistics. “We haven’t really seen it coming, but one of Tradenet’s team members came up to me all of a sudden and said he’s happy to see more female names on our students administrative documents”.

Barak and his team then decided to look a bit more into it. What they’ve found is that while the decade leading to 2016 saw a pretty flat growth of the female student percentage in relation to the whole student body, 2017 started showing an increase of the female share of the pie. And then, in 2018, the female side’s percentage growth has been in the double digits for the first time.

No one at Tradenet could provide an exact reason for that growth. They haven’t changed any of their sales and marketing approaches, haven’t addressed new client-types, or anything of that sort.  

So it’s time for me to do the guesswork. As a stock market fan myself, I can tell you I’ve always thought stock trading in general, and day-trading in particular are meant for women. Obviously, for historical reasons, women never had the chance to take such jobs, as trading jobs were well-paying and the incumbent men didn’t want more competition.

Today, however, it’s a different ball game altogether. You don’t need to be in Wall-Street or on a trading floor to trade stocks. Now you can do it from home. And what is stopping you from doing it if you are a female? Nothing, really.

Here is why day trading is for girls. Day trading requires multi tasking more than anything I’ve seen in the workplace. You need to watch and follow endless factors simultaneously. For example, if you are trading Apple stocks, you need to watch Apple on a 1 minute and 5 minute graph, while following the NASDAQ and the S&P500. You need to follow Apple on the Level 2, and follow the T&S. At the same time, you need to watch for any headline coming in with a market update or a scandal that can shake the market. And on top of all of those, you also need to tune in to a live trading chat room, of the sort Meir Barak is operating, to know what others are doing and follow their trades rather than their mistakes.

In addition, day trading requires a lot of homework and self-teaching. If you don’t prepare and make your plan for the trading day, you are sure to lose. Now, try to think of your days in school, college or university. Wherever it was, try to remember which gender was better at reading and doing their homeworks. Maybe I am wrong, but to my recollections, the girls are better at it. Add this to the formula and if I had to guess, I’d say by 2040 stock trading would be a woman job.

We are hoping that, as in any other field, we are drawing closer to gender equality. Hopefully, we would hear from more and more trading-related companies worldwide that their cohort is becoming more balanced. For now, let’s hope that soon Tradenet tells us they are close to equal numbers for women and men among their students.