In a truly bizarre story, CNBC is reporting allegations that traders at SAC Capital were forced to take female hormones in order to reduce their aggression, in hopes of improving trading performance. The allegations stem from a sexual harassment suit filed by one of the hedge fund’s junior traders, who claims that “the hormones caused [him] to start wearing dresses, avoid his wife’s touches altogether and allegedly begin a sexual relationship with his boss”. The story is all the more dramatic given that the trader’s boss is Ping Jiang, a top trader with a reported income north of $100 million a year.

Sexual harassment cases are nothing new on Wall Street, but CNBC has uncovered new details of one of the most salacious cases to hit a big trading house in a long time.

The case involves a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a Andrew Z. Tong, a former junior trader at SAC Capital, the powerful Greenwich, Conn., hedge fund, against one of SAC’s top producers, a trader named Ping Jiang.

A New York State judge has sealed the case and sent the lawsuit into arbitration, where both sides would battle it out in private. He even cancelled oral arguments that were scheduled for Thursday following an appeal by Tong’s lawyers, who want the case to remain in state court.

The judge said he sealed the details of Tong’s allegations contained in the lawsuit because it is not in the public interest to disclose the salacious nature of the complaints. CNBC has learned the suit includes the following allegations made by Tong against Jiang:

• After being hired at SAC, Tong alleges that Jiang came to him and told him he had a trading method in which his traders must not be too aggressive; that traders must be more effeminate and to do so, he directed Tong to begin taking female hormones.
• Tong says he then took the female hormones that he bought on the black market.
• Tong then alleges he suffered emotional and physical distress. The hormones, he says, caused him to begin wearing women’s clothes. He also could not perform sexually with his wife, who wanted to have a baby.
• Tong says the sexual harassment included sexual relations between the two men.

While the salacious details will certainly generate a lot of press, could it really be that giving your male traders estrogen Kool-Aid would actually improve their market performance? Let’s review the research.

In many contexts, men have been found to be systematically more overconfident than women. Among these is “Gender and Overconfidence” by Bengtsson, Persson, and Willenhag. The authors studied a Stockholm University economics exam which has an optional extra credit question, which only applies to a student’s grade if they did sufficiently well on the rest of the exam. While women overall are more likely to pass the exam, only 83.8% of them attempt the extra credit question, compared to 87.1% of men.

This type of overconfidence can induce many decision making biases which can depress investment returns. Among these are a tendency to trade too often, generating excessive trading costs, and attributing random market movements with one’s own predictive skill, which impairs learning. In a study of trading activity by 35,000 households with a large brokerage house, Barber and Odean report that due to overconfidence, men trade 45% more than women. This excessive trading reduces men’s average net returns by 2.65% a year, compared to a 1.72% reduction for women.

Let’s do a thought experiment. SAC Capital has about $14 billion in assets under management, and reportedly returned 34% in 2006. While the type of trading activity going on at SAC is far different from the household brokerage trades in the dataset studied above, let’s assume for a moment that SAC could capture the 0.93% male-female performance difference if only its traders all behaved more like women. This small performance edge would improve the fund’s returns by OVER A BILLION DOLLARS in five years.

Perhaps it’s no mystery then why a top trader would want his underlings to trade more like women. Maybe the real question then is why a hedge fund would think it was better off taking the substantial legal risk of forcing employees to take drugs against their will, as opposed to working to hire actual women — overconfidence, perhaps?

Read more:

• CNBC: Detail emerge in SAC Capital Sex Harassment Case
  
• Gender and Overconfidence, by Claes Bengtsson, Mats Persson and Peter Willenhag
• Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment, by Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean

Earlier:

• Mars and Venus on Wall Street
• All posts tagged “gender”
• All posts tagged “overconfidence”