![]() “I loved banking but I didn’t think I would be a great senior banker,” she says. I loved every minute of it.”Įventually, though, she was struck with the realization that convinced her to change her career course. I learned so much in those five years,” she recalls. “I was in every meeting and I was given responsibility for doing work above where my title would lend itself. she worked for an executive named Les Fabuss who promoted Raskin through the ranks, giving her access to the management teams of companies they were representing. “They are incredibly revealing if you look at them carefully, which, interestingly, not a lot of people do.” “I just loved the stories that financial statements told me about a company,” she says. Raskin would play a game where she examined a financial statement and tried to deduce what the company did by looking at sales growth, inventory turns, the balance sheet and so on. “That was where I really learned finance.” “It was an incredible education,” she says. After completing the program she worked in mergers and acquisitions at Lehman until 1999, working seven days a week and 12 to 16 hours per day. Morgan investment bankers convinced her to switch fields from telecom to finance by joining a two-year investment analyst program at Lehman Bros. “Most kids had limited hours watching TV, I had limited hours for doing jigsaw puzzles, so that tells you something,” she says - such as, perhaps, she inherited her father’s facility and affinity for numbers and analysis.Ī crossword puzzle is still usually a part of her daily regimen. Such number-intensive work as investment banking might seem droll to most people who consider numbers sterile and impersonal, but Raskin sees numbers as living and breathing strands of genetic code that often tell stories about companies that company executives are loath to confess.įinancial statements are puzzles, to Raskin, and puzzles are something she has been passionate about since childhood, when she spent so many hours assembling jigsaw puzzles that her parents set limits on the amount of time each day she was allowed to indulge. It was while in London she took notice of the team of investment banking analysts about her age, working harder and making more money than she was, and they appeared to be doing more interesting work. Morgan offices in New York City and London that the prospects of a career in financial services began to dawn. It was not until, consistent with her college program of study, she started her career as an engineer installing telecom systems at J.P. Still, Raskin says, there was not an inkling she was destined for the financial profession at that point in her life. “So, I certainly knew what they were and I knew about how people traded stocks.” “I grew up around stocks and hearing about them,” she says. (Raskin never took up her grandfather’s cigar-smoking habit, though her grandmother smoked cigars and lived to age 102.) Raskin’s paternal grandfather had a cigar stand on the bottom level of the New York Stock Exchange that she visited occasionally as a child, and her grandmother sold bull and bear jewelry from the stand. Hence, “The $26 billion woman” moniker bestowed upon her by the Washington (D.C.) Business Journal. Today, after making short order of that engineering degree, Amy Raskin is CIO of Chevy Chase Trust Investment Advisors with responsibility for $26 billion in assets the organization has under management. ![]() With respect to his youngest daughter, his calculations might have grandly exceeded expectations. Raskin was an actuary, after all, and was in the business of ascertaining predictable and financially viable outcomes. “My father’s famous saying was, ‘Go to museums on the weekends if you want to broaden your horizons,’” she recalls. Hence, her decision to study engineering. In other words, select a major with a direct path to a profession with gainful employment opportunities. (now Watson Wyatt Worldwide) before opening his own consulting business - insisted that he would pay for his three daughters’ college educations with the proviso they got accepted at institutions of higher learning that were “significantly better than a state school.”Ī young Amy Raskin cleared that hurdle with an acceptance letter from Penn, but her father had a secondary stipulation, that college was a means to an end. This much she did know: Her father - an actuary who worked for Buck Consulting and The Wyatt Co. She had no particular calling in life when she headed off to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue an engineering degree, despite having “no idea” how she would apply it professionally. Fortunately for Amy Raskin, life did not always go according to plan. ![]()
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