Institutional Investor’s Alpha Magazine, September 2007
Athena Capital founder Lisette Cooper is profiled in this article by Udayan Gupta which focuses on the “quantitative muscle” she brought to bear in 1996 while working as a consultant to build the business model and investment guidelines for Goldman Sachs’ private equity platform, while simultaneously running Athena Capital, which she had founded three years earlier. In both endeavors she drew from her prior experiences as a senior strategist with Merrill Lynch Capital in San Francisco, where she worked with institutional clients such as Bank of America, California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the Public Employee’s Retirement Association of Colorado to help design their investment portfolios, and at MSCI Barra, where she specialized in financial modeling for institutional investors. A scientist by educational training (she holds an undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University in earth and environmental sciences and a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard University), Dr. Cooper credits Robert Rubin, then a Goldman Sachs partner and future U.S. Treasury Secretary, with shifting her career focus to the financial markets. While taking courses at Harvard Business School in 1987, Dr. Cooper approached Rubin at a Goldman Sachs cocktail party for potential recruits and asked for his insights. She took his response to heart - to go into trading or fixed-income research or capital markets, working with derivatives products - although sometimes finds instances where the scientific and financial worlds overlap. In June 2007 she and her co-authors were granted a patent titled “Deriving a Probability Distribution of a Value of an Asset at a Future Time.”
Alternative Flight Plan – Phil Cooper’s Quantitatively Better Half
Institutional Investor’s Alpha Magazine, September 2007
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