Still life of folded american dollar notes making a shape of the dollar currency sign.
Trading stocks is one of the most underrated ways to close the gender wealth gap. Besides the pay gap in salaries, women invest 40% less than men creating a gap in investment portfolios between men and women. According to several studies, women actually make better stock investors than men. On a bigger scale, Wall Street and major banks need more female traders, but it is has been found that some women don’t even realize that trading is an option for them. With apps such as Robin Hood that coach users in how to trade starting on a small scale, younger generations especially women, are beginning to trade on the side to achieve financial freedom and reach their monetary goals even faster.
Victoria Elise found financial freedom through learning how to trade on the stock market.
Victoria Elise is one of those millennial women who taught herself to trade stocks in order to pay her way through college without debt in while adding an additional revenue stream for herself. For Elise she began trading as a way to pay for school without getting herself into debt. Although she began trading in her twenties she wishes she had learned about trading in her teenage years due to financial freedom she has reaped. Elise suggests everyone to begin investing in their twenties. “The reason you should start to invest in your twenties is simply time. If you invest early on in your life, you can make substantially more than someone say in their 30's or 40's. A $1000 investment at the age of 20, and contributing about $50 a month into it with 4% interest would yield almost $62,000 by the time that person is 60 years old. If the same investment is made at 30 years old, that person would have made around $37,000. Ten years can make a huge difference, even with a modest investment,” explains Elise
But what if you have no experience in trading? According to Elise there are several tools out there that can help you trade like a pro, “If you wish to get into trading with no experience, study first. There are lots of helpful articles online and books to read. Use a trading platform such as Think or Swim and use the Paper Trading feature. Paper Trading allows you to practice buying and selling stocks with essentially imaginary money.”
While trading is more of a hobby for Elise, she still finds caution in taking risks. “There's a lot of risk in trading. That's why I tend to suggest to others to invest for the long term instead. Trading can be extremely rewarding though, all it takes is one great trade and you're set for several months or even years in some cases. Having this much time has helped me focus on school and not have any debt. One thing is certain though, I would never consider trading a career path. You should have other goals in mind and keep trading as something you do occasionally and for fun,” says Elise.
As far as advice for those who have no experience trading, here are Elise’s top 5 tips:
- Don't have a "get rich quick overnight" mentality.
- Don't trade based on emotions, trade based on facts and statistics.
- Do your due diligence on a company before trading.
- Be weary of penny stocks. One can make a lot of money from them, but can also lose a lot as well. I have done both.
- Invest only what you can afford to lose. After all, trading is pretty much a gamble.
Wall Street no longer needs to be seen as an ivy league “boys club,” but rather as tool to advance the financial standings of women across the nation. If women continue increase earnings within their investment portfolios, we are then able to close the gender pay gape at faster rate.
