Alpha Ideas

There’s a trading culture out there that encourages risk-taking. A lot of this culture is tied up with the culture of masculinity. To be willing to take big risks is to have “balls”. Taleb himself has encouraged this idea, writing that “Those with brains but no balls often become mathematicians; those with balls but not brains join the mafia; and those with no brains and no balls become economists.” When asked who has “both brains and balls”, he replied that it was “traders”.

Sadly, this culture of testosterone-fueled risk-taking overconfidence is terrible for the average investor, as Brad Barber and Terry Odean have documented. Balls interfere with brains. They make you you believe you have better information than you have – in other words, they make you ignore risks. That’s probably why women, on average, make better traders than men. (And overconfidence is only exacerbated if, out of testosterone-fueled aggression, you angrily defend every single trade you ever made.)-from NoahOpinion