The Australian Financial Review is running a great story in its newspaper today about the rise and rise of women in the corridors of corporate power, with one in four CEOs of our big companies now under their leadership. And when you look at the businesses they lead, you could nearly go long women and create a pretty good portfolio of stocks based on how good these new age CEOs are.

Of course, I learnt many years ago in my early days of studying economics that you have to be careful of something called “post hoc ergo propter hoc”, which is Latin for “after this, therefore because of this”. Most people know I always need to make things more understandable so let me explain what that Latin saying means.

In simple terms it says that if A (like the arrival of women as CEOs) is followed by B (higher stock prices), you can’t simply say A caused B. In this case it would mean that higher stock prices were caused by the women being in charge.

Here are examples of what might have caused the share prices of a woman-led company to rise, other than their leadership. Say a war in Ukraine pushed up oil and coal prices so the CEOs in the energy sector have much higher share prices, thanks to that so and so Vladmir Putin! Or a CEO’s share price could spike when Beijing takes away a punitive tariff or the international gold price spikes on market crash fears. What I’m saying is that you can’t easily generalise about women taking on top jobs in public companies, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

A common disclaimer in the finance industry is to say that “history is no guide to future returns”, but when I assess a company, I place a lot of my analysis on the history of the company and its share price, as well as the calibre of its leaders. These charts show what I’m saying:

These charts scream that these are great companies and I always want to buy these sorts of companies when the market decides to dump them.

Few big companies in Australia have charts as good as these, but there are quality businesses now being run by women and I’ll list them below:

1. Vicki Brady at Telstra.
2. Leah Weckert at Coles.
3. Fiona Hickat at Fortescue Metals Group.
4. Shemara Wikramanayake at Macquarie.
5. Meg O’Neill at Woodside Energy.
6. Helen Lofthouse at the ASX.
7. Sue van der Merwe at Lottery Corp.
8. Sukhinder Singh Cassidy at Xero.
9. Vanessa Hudson replacing Alan Joyce, Qantas.
10. Sherry Duhe, interim CEO, Newcrest Mining.
11. Katie Page runs Harvey Norman.

These are all good companies I’d be happy to have in my super fund and I’m going to track what this “women-only” portfolio does over the next 12 months. I’m betting it will be an impressive return.