This week, we’re back to normally scheduled programming.
Today, we’ve got:
Table of Contents
Sexism is costing you money
March is Women’s History Month, which gives me an excuse to bang on about how stupid, unproductive, and unprofitable sexism is.
Despite what incels and other misogynists tell you, women still earn around $0.82 for every dollar men make for equivalent work in the USA. (If you want to see all the arguments and counterarguments, scroll to the bottom of this note. I won’t force you to read them here.)
This is striking and stupid for many reasons, but it’s especially galling in an industry known for efficient markets and logic – investing.
Female-led startups perform better than those led by men, particularly in generating higher revenue and providing better returns on investment. Specifically, VC-backed companies with a female founder performed 63 percent better than companies with all-male founders.
Furthermore, despite facing challenges in raising capital, female-founded VC-backed startups had a 19.4 percent exit rate. Only 14.5 percent of startups backed by venture capital are run by women.
Surely, VCs are clamoring to fund women, right? Only 2% of US VCfunding went to female-led startups in 2023. It’s around 5% in Europe.
And it’s not just startups.
A study by S&P Global analyzed earnings and share price data following 5,825 new executive appointments, of which 578 were women. It found that in the two years following a new CEO appointment, the stock price for companies that appointed female chief executives outperformed those that appointed men by an average of 20%. Additionally, companies with female CFOs saw an 8% outperformance on share price returns and a 6% outperformance on profitability in the 24 months following their appointment compared to those with newly appointed male CFOs.
Investors, it’s time to wake up.
American Migration
More fun with recent US Census data. (sign up to get their weekly updates if you’re into this stuff)
It looks like the pandemic-era domestic migration in the US is reversing course.
“Areas which experienced high levels of domestic out-migration during the pandemic, such as in the Midwest and Northeast, are now seeing more counties with population growth. Meanwhile, county population growth is slowing down out west, such as in Arizona and Idaho.”
The northeast is still seeing net negatives, but the rate is slowing. Likewise, the Midwest.
The numbers are most striking between large counties (100k+) and small ones (< 10k). Urban counties grew 0.76% YoY while rural ones shrunk by 0.27%.
Florida and Texas are the big winners:
- 96% of Florida counties gained population
- “Eight of the 10 counties that led the nation by numeric change in 2023 were in Texas. This included Harris County, which added 53,788 residents and was the largest-gaining county in the nation, followed by Collin County (36,364) and Montgomery County (31,800).”
Los Angeles, on the other hand, has lost 145,000 people over the last two years.
Maybe traffic is easing up, which is nice anyway.
Nearly half of our readers would move to Saudi Arabia
Not conetent with moving to Florida, nearly half our Stocks and Income (our daily markets email, click to subscribe and view your accounts page) readers say they’d consider moving to Saudi Arabia.
Would you consider moving to Saudi Arabia?
That 45% of our readers would consider moving to the Kingdom surprised me. A lot.
There’s no doubt that the Kindom’s star is on the rise.
Property searches are up.
Likewise, media sentiment and mentions.
And this quick hit of new stories supports that:
- Home ownership eyed by 77% of Saudi-based expats
- Saudi residential mortgage loans jump to 11-month high in January
- Saudi Arabia offers $182m incentive package for mining investors
- Saudi Arabia plans $40 billion push into artificial intelligence
- Saudi Arabia could double hotel rooms in the next 10 years
And then there’s Neom, the Kingdom’s trillion-dollar city of the future:
And while the video is impressive, it feels too much like this:
So what do you think? Would you consider moving to Saudi Arabia?
- 💰 Yes | Great investment potential
- 🤖 Yes | Looks like living in the future
- 🪓 No | Ethical reasons
- 🏡 No | Other reasons
I’m of two or three minds about it. Smash reply with your comments.
Young Americans are miserable.
While the average American is generally happy — ranked 23rd in the world — it’s a different story for Gen Z and below.
They rank 62nd globally, right around the middle.
And when this is the happiness chart, you don’t want to be in the middle:
