Sex and fund growth

Apparently sex can be good for your bank balance, and I’m not talking about selling your wares in the local red-light district. New research shows that if you have sex more than four times a week, you could be 5 per cent richer.

An academic paper by Nick Drydakis, at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge found that those who don’t have any sexual activity earn 3 per cent less than those who are sexually active … and those who have sex more than four times a week, earn 5 per cent more.

Economists like sex. It makes quite a useful measure of health and happiness for their purposes.

But it does also drives human beings into weird peacock-like behaviours. Stuff like high-risk trades that we can’t afford.

Let’s imagine that we managed to create the perfect socialist society, where everyone had enough of everything. Would we be happy? Or would we crave buying bigger, better things?

Unless we live in Scandinavia (where apparently everyone earns the same, has equal access to resources, and has loads of sex) … the answer is probably the latter. What drives this behaviour?

According to a paper by economists at the University of Western Australia, men practise something called “conspicuous consumption” to attract women.

Admittedly, ‘conspicuous consumption’ doesn’t sound very sexy.

But apparently (I’d like to point out that this isn’t based on my own theory or research, but just taken from a scientific paper!), women looking for casual sex are rather partial to this conspicuous consumption thing.

Despite sounding like a nasty case of catarrh, conspicuous consumption actually involves being downright reckless with your money. Something many forex traders are rather good at.

So, the graph between reckless trading and sex would be “n” shaped – where there are strong taboos about non-marital sex, there won’t be a motivation for conspicuous consumption. And where casual sex is freely available – again, there’s no motivation for reckless spending. The danger point comes where sexual morality is weakening – this is where the “peacock” behaviour really pays off – the 50s and 60s “Mad Men” era being a good example.

So, is sex good for your bank balance, or not?

Of course, we have to differentiate between actually having sex (good) … and trying to attract short-term sexual partners (not so good).

Who said that the markets weren’t moral?

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