Really? Billionaire trader claims babies kill a woman's success in trading

New York: Hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones is getting slammed after talking about “baby’s lips on a girl’s bosom” as a career-stunting “killer” for female Wall Street traders.

Jones, the founder of Tudor Investment Corp, a $13 billion hedge-fund firm based in Connecticut made the controversial comments last month at a University of Virginia panel that was not supposed to be reported on. But the _Washington Post_obtained the video which has since gone viral.

“As soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it,” Jones said, motioning to his chest during an April symposium.

“You will never see as many great women investors or traders as men. Period. End of story,” Jones, 58, said to an audience at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce. “And the reason why is not because they are not capable. They are very capable.”

In essence: Blame it on the babies, he said.

“As soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it,” said Jones, a graduate of Virginia University. “The idea that you could think straight for 60 seconds and be able to make a rational decision is impossible, particularly when their kids are involved.”

After his controversial comments went viral, Jones apologized for what he called “off the cuff” remarks:

“Much of my adult life has been spent fighting for equal opportunity, and the idea that I would support limiting opportunity for any segment of society, particularly women, is antithetical to who I am and what I have done,” he said.

Tudor also back pedalled by saying he was discussing the tiny pool of a few thousand global macro traders, who are on call at all hours in a profession that considers “emotional highs and lows” to be “obstacles to success.”

Macro trading “requires a high degree of skill, focus and repetition,” said Jones.

“Life events, such as birth, divorce, death of a loved one and other emotional highs and lows are obstacles to success in this specific field of finance,” he said.

Jones said he has encouraged his three daughters to go into the field, teaching them that “great success is possible in any field - from music to mathematics to macro trading - as long as a woman or man has the skill, passion, and repetitions to work through the inevitable life events that arise along the way.”

Female fund managers ruled the markets in 2012

Jones’ comments are flawed because research shows that women tend to be more risk adverse and often have better returns than men. A new study released by consulting firm Rothstein Kass found that female hedge fund managers outperformed men through 2012.

Last year hedge funds run by women made an 8.95 percent return while the global hedge fund index only returned 2.69 percent. The report also found that women-run hedge funds had beaten the global hedge fund index not only in 2012 but also for the five years leading up to 2012.

Former Bank of America executive Sallie Krawcheck also cites research that shows women are actually better investors, with their portfolios outperforming men’s by 1 percent annually.

In the bestselling book, “The Hour Between Dog and Wolf,” John Coates, who ran a derivatives desk in New York and is now a neuroscientist at Cambridge University, looks at just how emotionally influenced traders - mainly men - are.

The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have more than a little to do with male hormones. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk in men, especially younger men -significantly, the fear of risk is not reduced in women.

Similarly, intense failure leads to a rise in levels of cortisol, the antitestosterone hormone that lowers the appetite for risk across an entire spectrum of decisions.

Time Magazine also cited research saying trading operations need more women because there’s good reason to think women are much better-suited for the business than men.

“In the financial services industry, which remains remarkably inhospitable to women, trading in particular remains a testosterone-fueled subculture, one that could use a considered and ongoing rejiggering of the gender balance. This is not solely because we’re living in the 21st century and these kinds of hiring/staffing biases (intentional or not) are wrong and possibly illegal, but also because we’d likely avoid many of these kinds of trading debacles if more women were making the decisions,” wrote Gary Belsky in Time.

“This is not idle feminist speculation. It’s the only conclusion you can draw from what remains the seminal research on the topic: Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence and Commons Stock Investment.”