Many people’s journey to the top of a giant wealth management firm—one serving important institutional investors and the wealthy alike—might seem straightforward, but Lisette Cooper’s was anything but.
A self-described child of the ’60s and ’70s with a bent toward meditation and community activism, her journey through life sounds a bit capricious. She was a fun-loving teen—perhaps too fun loving—and yet a love of math not only fired her ambition but also led her into the go-go 1980s-1990s world of quant investing, at a time that field was undergoing a revolution. She suddenly found herself able to speak the language of algorithms at a time math nerds were reinventing Wall Street.
She took these ideas with her into her own firm, Lincoln, Mass.-based Athena Capital Advisors, where she ministers to the ultra-rich. Her entrepreneurial instincts even led her to try out a prototype robo-advisory years ahead of schedule.
This isn’t the kind of person you’d imagine having skipped a lot of high school classes. … Or having done so, then leapfrogging into a Harvard Ph.D. program as an environmental geologist.
Her amazing resume instead suggests that Cooper has remained intuitive and spiritually open. Besides running her firm, she teaches classes on meditation and sponsors conferences and helps kids with trauma. She’s even turned her love of algorithms into a new form of socially responsible investing.
Privilege And Pressure
Cooper’s parents did not come from poverty, but they quickly found it. They were 16 and 17 when they had their daughter Lisette, and got a taste of the poor life fairly quickly. Peripatetic students, they moved around the country attending colleges such as Vanderbilt and Yale in pursuit of academic careers (her father is a math professor, her mother the chief scientist for Army intelligence). They lived a lot of lean years in poor neighborhoods, one of their first homes being over an auto repair shop in Nashville, Tenn.
“It was hot dogs and beans and spaghetti and tuna casserole,” Cooper says.
When she was 8, they lived in the South Side of Chicago in an extremely dangerous neighborhood where she went to public school. This was shortly after the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention, when there was an air of political tension worsened by poverty. There were rapes at her elementary school, she says, and people kept “mugger money” on them in case they got robbed.
After stints in Chicago and New Haven, Conn., eventually, her family relocated to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In Chicago, she’d been the only white girl in class, and in her new Southern burg there were no people of color in her class. She said the experience allowed her to see different sides of American economic and racial life and the importance of education in both areas.
In Virginia, as a teenager in the early ’70s, Cooper said that she was in the middle of the rock ’n’ roll generation, and was not immune to its allures. “I was anti-establishment. I thought I was all grown up when I was 14 and I was ready to go off and earn a living then. … I was a bit of a rebel and didn’t want anybody to tell me what to do.”
She describes the town in Virginia at the time as friendly but banal—somewhat repressed and perhaps a little sexist. “I had a great social life but I had to pretend not to be smart.
“I basically never went to high school,” she says. “I hung out with my friends on the corner, which is part of the University of Virginia campus, or played pool. I only showed up at school to take the tests. I could not wait to get out of high school.” She did after three years, going to college at Wesleyan when she was still 16.
Her aptitude tests told her she was bound for better things, and she straightened up for college, getting A’s and accolades.
“My parents said I had to major in science in college because they wanted to make sure I could learn a living.”
She majored in earth and environmental science as an undergrad. The subject captured her imagination and would allow her to travel to places such as Newfoundland, Wales and China to do field work—looking at phosphatic fossils, researching the chemical signature in the oceans and studying the growth of continents. She went from her undergrad program right into the Ph.D. program in geological science at Harvard.
“My specialty was isotope geochemistry,” she says. “It was very mathy and very much working in the lab.”
But while the work was interesting, like many scientists she found the lab life somewhat sterile and lonely. Most of the time she labored over mass spectrometers in windowless rooms, boiling things in acid.
Deciding she needed a humanity bath, she cast about for new things to do.
Curious about finance, she sat in on business classes at the Harvard Kennedy School, and had the kind of epiphany perhaps only available to a numbers person: The Black-Scholes equation popped up in a discussion of stock options. It looked exactly like the heat flow equations she was using on rocks.
“Just imagine something that’s hot and in a particular location—like a lightbulb—and as you move your hand further and further away from the lightbulb … the heat is more and more spread out in the space. … [It] sort of gets there by what’s called a random walk by diffusion.
“Likewise, if you have a stock, if it’s at a certain price, then the next day the price is probably going to be pretty close to what the stock price was the previous day. But as you go further and further out in time, it’s like going further and further away in space from the heat source.”
After school, she went to work in capital markets as a quant specialist in institutional products at Merrill Lynch working directly with institutional investors on unique investment asset allocation and benchmarking products. She later went to Barra where she could be a more objective arbiter of what institutions needed from quantitatively managed risk control investment strategies, working as a consultant for asset managers and banks (at this time she was located in the Bay Area). “I came to run that business to apply those mathematical models to real life client situations that needed to be customized,” she says. “Really taking the kind of work I had done at Merrill Lynch matching up the providers of investment product with the folks who wanted to buy investment products.”