Risk Tolerance - A Gender Difference?

Check out Jason Zweig's Mother's Day article in his regular column, The Intelligent Investor from the Wall Street Journals' Money & Investing section on Saturday, May 9. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124181915279001967.html

Whether it’s Wall Street, or Main Street, or pillow talk, it doesn’t matter. The author references Dr. Jennifer Lerner, a a Harvard Psychologist, but he doesn’t realize that this is not a gender issue. Gender is only a piece of this risk tolerance issue.

Women do bring a more balanced perspective about risk and risk tolerance than men - for all the reasons the author states (men tend to be more competitive than women and thus their desire to 'win', men are more likely to take action based on anger where women tend to take action based on fear)

But it’s more than that. It’s not so much about men and women as it is the balance of our masculine and feminine energies. That balanced perspective is what has been missing from our investments and our businesses, both large and small.

It's more than gender. It's a requirement every day to balance our masculine and feminine energies. This goes beyond gender. Both men and women have reserves of each kind of energy. The opportunity for all of us is to do whatever it takes to maintain a balanced perspective, especially about the important issues like our personal investments.