LOSING MONEY IS A LESSON PROFESSIONAL WOMEN NEED TO LEARN
Too many women haven’t learned to cut their losses and move on. They haven’t realized that to profit from investments you must also lose some bets.
When stocks go wrong, men blame it on advisers, the market or economic conditions. Women blame loss on themselves.
Men assume they’ll somehow make up the loss. Women feel like it’s lost forever or they keep trying to prove themselves right.
While you’re in growing or peak earning years, you can afford to burn some money in order to learn how to invest for yourself. It will give you the power, smarts and confidence to make investing decisions later, when you can’t afford to make money mistakes—at age sixty to, say, ninety.
The path to becoming an educated investor is not to sign up for one of those endlessly proliferating women-only brokerage seminars (which, I should point out, have self-interested agendas). Nor is it to attend a continuing ed course, like “Reading the Wall St. Journal” (though that can’t hurt).
Rather, allocate some dough to invest as a learning exercise and, step by step, educate yourself. “It’s about confidence and the level of socialization,” says one woman entrepreneur, who taught herself about stock trading and says she’s done well, including with early investments in Dell, Yahoo!, Microsoft and RIM.
Start by doing your own research, online and off. Consult the analysts and market gurus, whether in financial trade journals or through online outlets or cable TV business programming. See how what you think jives with what you read or hear. Then start trading with the money you’ve earmarked.
After that, you’ll be more inclined to feel like your financial advisers are working for you rather than the other way round.