Shipping has piqued investors’ interest as markets have risen over the past two years, but female investors are still outnumbered by their male counterparts. The reasons behind this disparity are less clear. Often, female investors in this industry are women with family connections to shipping companies. A much rarer breed are female retail investors who have been attracted to the sector on the strength of its merits or out of curiosity, or women who work for institutions such as funds and private equity.

The gender of the people putting money into a company matters little. But engaging with women could come with benefits not just for shipping companies but for the finance sector that surrounds it, according to the professionals with whom TradeWinds spoke. As markets rise, a strategic aim for many public shipping companies is to grow their market capitalizations to become mid-cap stocks. Star Bulk Carriers, for one, is targeting a market cap of $3.8bn. This quest will involve marketing to a bigger audience, for one thing. Targeting women could be a way to unlock untapped potential.

Christina Stahn is managing partner at Notos Group, a “boutique” consultancy that works with institutional investors. Her firm specializes in the shipping and hydrogen sectors, advising on investments in debt and equity, as well as on restructurings, mergers, and acquisitions. She told TradeWinds that women in her line of work are few and tend to be less visible. “But that is nothing that can’t change and indeed I believe it is already changing,” she said. Stahn started her career in the international ship-finance department of one of the world’s biggest ship-financing banks of the time. “After about 10 years, I left to work with Notos as I have become interested in the equity side as well,” she said. “As it happened, Notos was developing an investor base for investments in maritime stocks, and at the same time was heavily involved in advisory services about the restructuring of bad shipping assets. “I liked the challenges of these businesses as various factors came together: you need a fundamental view of the shipping markets, a view of the capital markets, the respective companies themselves, and keep very close to the ‘real’ asset side through the restructuring business.”

Stahn thinks that encouraging women to invest their cash will ultimately have benefits for the wider financial sector. “I believe it is important for women to deal with the investment of their assets themselves, as a source of income in the future and particularly for their retirement,” she said. “If this catches on, there will be more and more women who will also be interested in doing it professionally. At the same time, it may help women to have more confidence in investing and in their investing decisions if they can get professional advice from other women.”

A few of the women to whom TradeWinds spoke said they perceived a certain psychological barrier among women — a certain lack of confidence and the perception that women somehow need to “prove themselves” and be even more professional than the men. New online platforms have been cropping up to help women break through these barriers, offering coaching and investment management. In Denmark, Female Invest focuses on financial education and has its own online community. Danish shipping company Norden collaborated with Female Invest and hosted two sessions late last year to introduce members of the platform to the world of shipping and to help them understand the industry. In the US, Ellevest describes itself as a “robo-advisor investment platform and financial literacy program primarily for women”. “We’ve heard from so many women that they have a different approach to investing than men,” Ellevest chief investment officer Sylvia S Kwan wrote in the company’s online manifesto. “Women are more risk-aware, and they prefer less volatility and more certainty of achieving their goals over taking big bets that may or may not be accompanied by greater investment returns. We’ve heard that what matters most to her is the achievement of her financial goals, and not outperformance as compared to an arbitrary benchmark.”

There is something young-feeling and, well, cool about platforms like Female Invest and Ellevest. Both have big presences on social media and their Instagram grids are basically meme pages, making jokes about spending habits and portfolio management. The humor may be niche, but it speaks the language of its audience. Nicole Andrescavage, who is based in the US, has been investing for about six years after a professor at her university sparked her interest in economics. “I invest on my own through Robinhood, mostly because I’m interested in the overall market but also for better returns than a savings account would offer,” she told TradeWinds. “I also have a 401K, which I intend to begin co-managing. I read a lot of books about Warren Buffett, and then his own writings, so I began to build my portfolio based off the teachings I took away from that.” Andrescavage thinks more could be done to engage female investors like herself. “Investors, if they are active traders and really following the entities they’re invested in, do get to have a say in business operations at times,” she said. “And their money either talks or walks, which isn’t super important on a micro scale, but certainly is at the macro level. Why wouldn’t we encourage women investors to chase that? My shipping industry holdings have done quite well over time too, which evidences the ability to personally benefit from the investments financially. The more the industry is in the news, the better for growing that now-increasing interest.” For other women, it is not a case of lacking in confidence, it is one of shipping having the right investment story to tell and the right person to tell it. As Andrescavage puts it: “It’s a great time to push more maritime/shipping stories into the news and attract that new money — and now is the industry’s chance to ‘elevator pitch’ how important and beneficial it is.”

TradeWinds spoke to several different female investors who said they got into investing in shipping following recommendations by J Mintzmeyer, founder of Value Investor’s Edge. The online platform is another example of how equities research is being democratized and made more accessible — to a diverse audience. Many of the women who invest in shipping stocks in their spare time had something in common: shares in Zim. The Israel-based liner operator launched its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in early 2021 and its share price and its profits have ridden high on the back of headline-grabbing demand for container shipping since then. The stock was also the top pick on Value Investor’s Edge last year.

Jette Lise Knudsen from Denmark has been investing in shipping stocks for many years — both in Oslo and in the US. She thinks the ongoing story of shipping’s green transition has been and will be a good hook to get more women into the field. Knudsen thinks women are probably outnumbered by men in the investment field — but wonders if maybe women just don’t talk about it as much in public. Like Andrescavage, Knudsen thinks another good year lies ahead, which will help boost the industry’s profile among would-be investors. “I think 2022 will be another great year — and I am invested accordingly. When the next quarterly reports start to tick in soon, it will be obvious how attractive the shipping business has been again,” she told TradeWinds. “Hopefully a lot of new money will be pouring in then, and push the share prices to the level that they deserve.”

Stahn has her own advice for women looking to put their money in shipping. “Shipping equity investments should only be seen as a small part in an overall equities portfolio — the sector is too volatile for standard retail portfolios,” she said. “There are now two shipping ETFs [exchange-traded funds] available in the market — maybe that’s a more diversified approach for retail investors, but they are still very small in assets under management. I see shipping equities more on the institutional or HNWI [high net-worth individual] investors’ side.” It may be uncommon to find women handling equities portfolios that include shipping investments, but they are out there. “I work at a PE [private equity] fund with a portfolio company in logistics and I’m yet to come across a single woman,” one woman told TradeWinds. “It may be a function of shipping being a rather niche industry.”

Perhaps one of the most prolific female institutional investors is Sara Nainzadeh, who manages a portfolio for hedge fund Millennium Management — one of the world’s largest alternative asset management firms. Nainzadeh has dipped in and out of shipping equities for the best part of 20 years, alongside shares in utilities, transport companies, energy firms and other commodity producers. She was named one of The Hedge Fund Journal’s 50 leading women in hedge funds in 2020 and has spent a large part of her career at Millennium, plus a few years of running her own fund. Millennium had holdings in 22 different US-listed shipping companies during the third quarter of 2021, comprising all the major names across the mainstream shipping sectors, according to its latest available regulatory filing. Other institutional investors have women at the helm too. Barbara Ann Bertrand of Wincrest Capital has had dealings in shipping in the past but is not thought to be currently active in the sector.