Men still worse at investing than women

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Men didn't get any better at investing in 2015, at least compared to their female counterparts.

The median male investor lost 1.8 percent over the last 12 months, including fees and dividends, while women squandered only 1.4 percent, according to a review of 360,000 investors using robo-advisor Sigfig to track their portfolios.

Of course, we're all pretty dismal — the S&P 500 was down 1.1 percent over that same period. So if everyone invested $100,000, the median man threw away $670 more than if he had simply invested in an index fund, and the median woman wasted $270.

In a sense, that's actually better than last year, when the market was up. The median investor last year far underperformed the booming market; the average man investing a hypothetical $100,000 made $8,250 less than the S&P 500 and the average woman made $7,650 less.

This certainly isn't the first time analysts have looked at the gender difference in investing. Researchers noticed the trend two decades ago: Men tend to be overconfident in their trading, and to trade far more often than women.

That's a bad idea for at least two reasons: It wastes money on transaction fees, and it makes it easier to trade in reaction to short-term changes in the market. For example, Sigfig found that traders who reacted to the market correction in August 2015 tended to do worst than those who did nothing.

For those reasons, traders with the highest turnover in their portfolios consistently underperform their more patient peers — in 2015, the median portfolio with 100 percent turnover lost nearly 5 percent, while those with less than 10 percent turnover lost less than 1 percent.

On the bright side, men may have learned a thing or two in the last year; the turnover gap between men and women narrowed very slightly this year compared to 2014.

Men still have a long way to go. The 2015 data suggest that men trade about 30 percent more than women, which isn't much better than the 45 percent researchers found for men trading from 1991 to 1997.

Men and women also tend to pick different stocks to invest in, but it looks like moving investments around too much is the main factor causing the performance gap. According to a Big Crunch analysis, there doesn't seem to be a strong relationship between a female preference for a stock and its price change over the last year. Take a look at that data yourself below:

Ticker	Company	Female pref.	Price change
AA	Alcoa Inc.	13.4%	-36.0%
AAPL	Apple Inc.	7.6%	4.3%
ABBV	AbbVie, Inc.	33.2%	-11.7%
ABT	Abbott Laboratories	22.1%	6.1%
AMZN	Amazon.com	8.0%	129.0%
AXP	American Express	-7.0%	-19.9%
BA	Boeing Company	6.8%	19.2%
BABA	Alibaba Group	14.4%	-20.0%
BAC	Bank of America	-4.0%	6.2%
BIDU	Baidu, Inc.	11.8%	-9.4%
BMY	Bristol-Myers Squibb	1.8%	22.6%
BP	BP p.l.c.	-17.6%	-13.7%
BRK.B	Berkshire Hathaway Inc.	5.8%	-6.5%
C	Citigroup Inc.	-2.1%	5.3%
CAT	Caterpillar Inc.	6.6%	-24.2%
CELG	Celgene	4.8%	5.1%
CMCSA	Comcast	12.5%	7.1%
COP	ConocoPhillips	1.5%	-21.9%
COST	Costco	-3.4%	18.5%
CSCO	Cisco Systems, Inc.	-2.3%	2.4%
CVS	CVS Health	7.7%	5.7%
CVX	Chevron	-0.5%	-8.1%
DD	E. I. du Pont de Nemours	14.3%	1.6%
DIS	Walt Disney	3.1%	26.2%
DOW	Dow Chemical	0.1%	18.8%
DUK	Duke Energy	15.9%	-13.1%
EMC	EMC	2.3%	-7.4%
EMR	Emerson Electric Co.	9.0%	-22.1%
ESRX	Express Scripts	24.6%	9.1%
F	Ford Motor	-5.6%	1.9%
FB	Facebook, Inc. Class A	5.0%	43.0%
FCX	Freeport-McMoRan, Inc.	-6.4%	-68.4%
FTR	Frontier Comm	19.5%	-25.5%
GE	General Electric	3.1%	26.5%
GILD	Gilead Sciences, Inc.	1.2%	2.9%
GLW	Corning Incorporated	25.8%	-10.7%
GM	General Motors	-18.0%	14.4%
GOOG	Alphabet Inc. Class C	36.1%	53.4%
GOOGL	Alphabet Inc. Class A	30.8%	55.9%
GSK	GlaxoSmithKline	5.1%	-4.0%
HD	Home Depot, Inc.	7.5%	36.9%
HPQ	HP Inc.	-7.4%	-27.6%
IBM	IBM Corp	1.5%	-8.0%
INTC	Intel	7.9%	-0.7%
JNJ	Johnson & Johnson	13.8%	2.4%
JPM	JPMorgan Chase & Co.	41.1%	15.6%
KHC	Kraft Heinz	39.6%	24.1%
KMB	Kimberly-Clark	11.4%	12.0%
KMI	Kinder Morgan Inc	1.5%	-58.1%
KO	Coca-Cola	4.7%	8.5%
LLY	Eli Lilly and Company	18.2%	24.6%
LMT	Lockheed Martin	0.3%	17.3%
LUV	Southwest Airlines Co.	17.3%	13.2%
MA	MasterCard	2.4%	21.1%
MCD	McDonald's	20.2%	32.8%
MDLZ	Mondelez	14.6%	24.5%
MDT	Medtronic Plc	-2.6%	10.1%
MMM	3M Company	8.3%	-5.7%
MO	Altria Group, Inc.	-3.8%	19.5%
MRK	Merck & Co., Inc.	25.6%	-4.9%
MSFT	Microsoft	-0.8%	24.3%
NFLX	Netflix, Inc.	9.3%	171.3%
NKE	NIKE	-10.4%	40.5%
ORCL	Oracle	-0.7%	-4.2%
PEP	PepsiCo, Inc.	9.0%	9.2%
PFE	Pfizer Inc.	43.2%	6.2%
PG	Procter & Gamble	16.0%	-9.4%
PM	Philip Morris	4.4%	10.8%
PSX	Phillips 66	-1.9%	23.9%
QCOM	QUALCOMM	5.0%	-31.6%
SBUX	Starbucks	7.2%	52.5%
SE	Spectra Energy	37.4%	-28.3%
SIRI	Sirius XM	16.8%	22.8%
SLB	Schlumberger NV	-14.5%	-11.2%
SO	Southern Company	-3.2%	-3.0%
T	AT&T Inc.	7.9%	7.0%
TGT	Target	-10.2%	2.1%
TSLA	Tesla Motors, Inc.	-11.9%	18.6%
TWTR	Twitter, Inc.	-19.8%	-30.8%
TWX	Time Warner	28.9%	-18.2%
UA	Under Armour	-9.7%	25.1%
UNH	UnitedHealth Group	1.9%	24.0%
UTX	United Technologies	2.1%	-16.0%
V	Visa Inc. Class A	8.4%	26.1%
VZ	Verizon	12.6%	2.2%
WBA	Walgreens Boots Alliance	40.9%	17.0%
WFC	Wells Fargo	-2.3%	5.8%
WFM	Whole Foods Market	25.1%	-29.7%
WMT	Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.	14.7%	-27.3%
XOM	Exxon Mobil	4.3%	-8.4%
YHOO	Yahoo! Inc.	10.3%	-30.8%
PMCS	PMC-Sierra, Inc.	1217.3%	34.1%