Liz Ann Sonders, Managing Director and Chief Investment Strategist at Charles Schwab, shares her advice for those just starting their career in finance.
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00:00Things have changed so much since you started working in finance.
00:03If you were getting started now, what would you do differently or what advice do you have?
00:07Well, I think the opportunities are extraordinary and in particular maybe for women.
00:12When I started in 1986, it was much more and I started in New York, you know,
00:18work working at a Wall Street firm and it, you know, the original movie Wall Street
00:24was, you know, it was stretched a bit for the benefit of, you know, the movies but it wasn't
00:31all that stretched relative to the kind of old boys network and boiler room kind of stuff.
00:38I was very fortunate to be at a firm that, you know, believed in diversity and promoting women
00:47but I think opportunities in general are extraordinary right now and also for women.
00:51I think there's been an interesting shift too within sort of this category of big Wall Street
00:57firms away from just day-to-day trading and, you know, stock picking to wealth management
01:05and financial planning and in that space, the world of wealth managers and registered
01:10investment advisors, independent asset management firms, not to mention the wealth management
01:16divisions within many of the larger organizations. I think there's such a huge opportunity there
01:22because in the case of the individual, you know, managers, the RAA space, registered investment
01:28advisors, it's really a first-generation business and one of the things we're working with the
01:33advisors on our platform is around succession planning and anytime you have an industry that
01:39is a first-generation industry that's been around now for a while, the opportunities associated with
01:45that planning for the next generation, I think, provides great opportunities and I continue to
01:52think that Wall Street gets painted with a negative brush too often and that's one of the
01:57conversations I often have with young people who are considering entering into this
02:01business. I think it's a great business and it does get painted with, I think,
02:07an erroneous brush or too broadly and, by the way, it's also fun and the thing I like
02:14most about what I do specifically, but I talk to a lot of people in this industry that
02:20agree with me, is there's almost no monotony. Every single day you wake up and there's something
02:27new, in my case, to write about, to talk about, to think about and I find that exciting. What is the
02:32biggest risk you've taken in your career? So it was really shifting from my, I guess it was my first
02:4115 years in the business and I've been doing this for 38 years. I was a portfolio manager. I was a
02:47bottom-up stock picker. I didn't enjoy that at all. I particularly didn't enjoy the period from
02:53the mid to late 90s when, at the time, I worked for a single mandate aggressive large-cap growth
03:01firm and I didn't like being pigeonholed in that kind of mandate. I was always more fascinated by
03:08top-down macro analysis, figuring out the big picture and sentiment trends and monetary policy
03:15and its impact on the economy and market. So when I joined Schwab via its acquisition of U.S. Trust
03:22and was offered the opportunity to take on this role, which had not existed before at Schwab,
03:28they gave me a lot of rope and a lot of freedom to sort of create the role in the, you know,
03:36vision of Schwab and what makes us unique relative to a lot of the traditional Wall Street firms
03:41because we have individual investors and I think that audience is very different from
03:47institutional investors and it's why we don't do short-term market timing and year-end price
03:51targets. But, you know, taking on that role and not having somebody in the role before to emulate,
03:57I think, was probably the biggest risk. But I've, you know, I've been thrilled at the ride so far.
04:06you