Last year, like in 2000, the commercials during the Super Bowl were dominated by the hottest current investment themes: Cryptocurrency and sexy new technology companies. Please see my post from last February addressing what a mistake it can be to put your hard earned dollars into unproven trends, often hyped by celebrity promoters who have little knowledge of complex investments (hint-hint: Tom, Gisele, and FTX). These high-flying “FOMO” (fear of missing out) ideas of the past abruptly stopped working last year, and many who had chased the shiny ideas of Crypto and NFTs incurred very significant losses.

This year, we won’t see commercials from potential high-flying investments, but from from more down to earth consumer companies. We will see, however, a cool all-female team of Navy high flyers soar over State Farm Stadium to celebrate the start of the game and 50 years of women pilots in the military. I too, have stood on the shoulders of women who were early to my industry. This week in Miami one of the biggest industry conferences was held, and there were several tributes to Kathleen Moriarty, who was a pioneer in the investment world, and instrumental in creating the first Exchange Traded Fund. Muriel Siebert was the first woman to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, joining the 1,365 male members in 1967, the year I was born.

For decades, women have broken the sound barrier to enable me to soar in the investment world today. The Pawleys Dividend Fund and Pawleys Growth Fund have consistently outperformed the market, as we select stocks of companies with little or no debt, consistent earnings growth, and rock-solid cash-flow. There are numerous studies that show female fund managers perform better than their male counterparts, yet only a tiny fraction of funds are women-led. Women are still taxiing down the runway to gain more market share, and our soaring performance will get us there.