Tech, Tesla stocks help women fund managers outperform male counterparts in 2020: Report

Female fund managers, who remain woefully under-represented in the US Mutual Fund industry, have done a better job picking stocks than their male counterparts in 2020, Bloomberg reported.

According to data compiled by Goldman Sachs Group, among 500 large-cap US mutual funds, those with at least one-third manager posts held by women have exceeded those with no women by 1 percentage point this year.

The gender difference hardly had any impact on fund performance in the previous three years, Bloomberg reported.

The woman-managed funds benefitted from their liking towards tech shares, which are on an upswing since the outbreak of COVID-19, with the S&P 500 IT index gaining 58 percent so far in 2020.

Their investment in electric carmaker Tesla, which has soared over 400 percent this year against S&P 500's gain of 10 percent, has helped them increase their lead.

On the other hand, male managers favoured financial stock which has been the second-worst performing sector on S&P 500, down 3.84 percent in 2020.

"Even after adjusting for risk, female-managed funds have outperformed their counterparts amid the pandemic-related market swings," said Goldman strategists led by David Kostin in a note to clients.

The note said the tech sector “is the largest source of disagreement between female-managed and all other large-cap mutual funds".

Only 3 percent of the mutual funds tracked by Goldman have an all-female fund manager team, collectively managing just 2 percent of total assets. In contrast, 77 percent are managed by an all-male team, with these funds accounting for 57 percent of assets.