Norwegian women beat men in stock trading for risk averse instinct

Norway is already well-known for its gender equality in the world and a new study shows that female shareholders in the Nordic country also outperformed men in their investments so far this year.

Norwegian women on average have a return of nine percent over the first three months of this year, while men have about six percent, according to a report published by AksjeNorge, a non-profit organization that develops statistics on private individual shareholders in Norway and seeks to increase the public's knowledge of equities and financial markets.

Although the total number of female shareholders dropped from 108,207 in 2014 to 108,161 in the first quarter of 2015, their share value increased from 15.81 billion Norwegian kroner (2.04 billion U.S. dollars) to 17.27 billion kroner (2.23 billion U.S. dollars).

In the same period, the total number of male shareholders increased from 238,180 to 238,896 and their share value rose from 53.95 billion kroner (6.96 billion U.S. dollars) to 57.43 billion kroner (7.41 billion U.S. dollars).

"Women are generally more risk averse when investing in equity markets and choose to invest in larger companies with a good historical track record with less volatility," Lene M. Refvik, general manager of AksjeNorge, told Xinhua.

"The company profile in their investments can indicate that they have a more long term view when investing in these markets compared to men," she said. "We will typically see that their portfolio falls less in turbulent markets, such as we see now with tumbling oil prices."

Figures comparing 2010 with the first quarter of 2015 show that although the number of women investing in the equity markets are stable compared to men - about 30 percent are women and 70 percent men - women's portfolio is steadily increasing, from 21 percent in 2010 to 23 percent in 2015. Endit