Men are more likely to invest, and often more sure of themselves. But in an ISA or SIPP, too much trading and higher charges can quietly cost you tens of thousands.
Be honest. Somewhere on your phone there’s an investing app, and you check it more often than you’d tell your GP. You read the markets pages. You’ve got opinions on interest rates. You think you’re better at this than the average punter.
You might be right. But the research has an awkward message for confident investors. Feeling sure of yourself and actually getting good returns are two different things, and the gap between them comes out of your pension pot.
On who invests, the numbers are clear. The Financial Conduct Authority’s Financial Lives survey from May 2024 found that men were still more than one and a half times as likely as women to hold investments. Men also had more investible assets on average. In the same survey, men were more likely than women to give the right answers to questions about what the regulator protects.
So men turn up more often, with more money and more knowledge. That’s a good start. The trouble starts when knowing a bit tips over into thinking you know a lot.
When the FCA looked at people choosing their own higher-risk investments, it found high confidence and high claimed knowledge. Alongside that, many didn’t seem to take the risks seriously. More than four in ten didn’t count losing some money as one of the risks of investing, even though their whole stake was at risk. In its own research the regulator names overconfidence as one of the common behavioural biases that trip investors up.
Academics have been circling this for decades. A well-known US study of brokerage accounts found that men traded a lot more than women, and that the extra trading cut their net returns. Being confident isn’t the problem. The habits that come with it are.
Usually, yes. In April 2025 the FCA published a paper based on real data from several trading apps. Investors who traded the most, which it defined as more than one trade a day, had substantially poorer returns. The paper also found that app features such as flashing prices and trader leaderboards could push people to trade more.
The reason is dull but it doesn’t go away. Every trade costs something: a dealing fee, the gap between the buying and selling price, sometimes a currency charge or stamp duty on UK shares. And every time you sell, you risk getting out just before the recovery you were waiting for.
The market doesn’t charge you for being wrong. It charges you for being busy.
The confident investor sees a dip as a chance to be clever. The disciplined investor sees it as a reason to do nothing. Over 15 or 20 years, doing nothing has a better record than most people want to admit.
This is where the damage adds up. Charges look tiny on their own. A platform fee, a fund charge and some trading costs might each be a fraction of a percent. Together, they compound against you every single year.
Take a 50-year-old with £100,000 in a SIPP who leaves it alone until 65. Assume 5% a year growth before charges. That’s purely illustrative, and real returns go up and down. With total charges of 0.5% a year, the pot reaches about £192,800. At 1.5% it reaches about £165,700. That’s roughly £27,000 less for the same money left alone for the same 15 years.
Now add in an active trader’s habits, with frequent dealing and the odd fashionable, expensive fund pushing the total drag to 2% a year. The pot ends at about £153,500, around £39,000 short of the cheap, boring version.
The same goes for a Stocks and Shares ISA. Put in £500 a month for 15 years and you’ve invested £90,000. On the same 5% assumption with 0.5% in charges, that grows to about £127,000. With a 2.5% total drag it comes to roughly £107,800. Nearly £20,000 has gone, and you never noticed it leaving.
The tax wrapper protects you from HMRC. It doesn’t protect you from yourself. The ISA allowance is £20,000 for 2025/26 and stays at £20,000 for 2026/27, and gains and income inside it are tax-free. Inside a SIPP, contributions get basic-rate tax relief added at source, and higher and additional-rate taxpayers claim the rest. Scottish taxpayers claim relief at Scottish rates, which have different bands. Those reliefs are valuable. It would be a shame to hand a big slice of them to dealing costs.
None of this needs a degree in finance. It mostly needs you to get out of your own way.
Know your total cost. Add up the platform fee, the fund charges and what you spend on trades in a year, and work it out as a percentage of your pot. If you can’t easily find these numbers, that tells you something.
Write your rules down before the market tests them: how much goes in each month, how you split it, and when you’ll rebalance. Once or twice a year is plenty for most people. Then stick to them when the headlines get loud.
Match the risk to when you need the money. At 58, with retirement a few years off, a big fall hurts more than it did at 38 because there’s less time to recover. Being confident is no reason to keep the risk of a younger investor.
Treat apps with suspicion. If it’s designed to feel like a game, it’s designed to make you trade. Turning off price alerts costs nothing.
And know when to get help. If you’re over 50 with a defined contribution pension, Pension Wise offers a free, impartial appointment. MoneyHelper covers the basics on fees and investing. For big decisions, such as consolidating pensions or planning how you’ll draw an income, an FCA-regulated financial adviser costs money but can save you from far more expensive mistakes. Check any firm is on the FCA register before you hand over a penny.
Men are more likely to invest and often feel surer of themselves. But FCA research links overconfidence and frequent trading to worse results, and higher charges quietly cost tens of thousands of pounds over 15 years in an ISA or SIPP. What does you good is mostly dull: low total costs, risk that fits when you need the money, and the discipline to leave your investments alone.
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