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Dana B. Hall, CFA, is a former managing director and member of the executive committee at Lighthouse Partners, LLC, a co-founder of the global membership association “100 Women in Hedge Funds,” and an honoree in the “2005 Women Who Make a Difference” award given by the National Council for Research on Women.
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Hall is a former managing director and member of the executive committee at Lighthouse Partners LLC, an investment management firm with US$4 billion in four hedge funds. Her 22 years in financial services include roles as chief of staff to the president and CEO of Delaware Investments, a US$90 billion investment management company in Philadelphia, as director of fixed income and derivatives product development at Centre Investments in Bermuda, and as an investment banker.
Most notably, however, Hall is a co-founder of 100 Women in Hedge Funds, a global membership association of more than 2,700 professional women whose mission is to advance the interests of hedge-fund investors and practitioners by engaging the professional women in the sector. That pivotal leadership role in a fractured, cottage industry dominated by men earned her an award as one of the “2005 Women Who Make a Difference” from the National Council for Research on Women.
“Now, bringing women together is not an original idea,” Hall said in her acceptance speech. “What I’m really proud of is that we’ve changed the dialogue that women are having in our sector.”
Hall started out on Wall Street in 1984 during a transitional period, when opportunities for women in the investment arena had just begun to increase. After completing a liberal arts education from Smith College, she ended up in the unlikely world of mergers and acquisitions at Kidder, Peabody, where she took on the intensity of structuring financial transactions. That strong grounding in finance led to an opportunity with the currency overlay team at JP Morgan Investment Management in 1987.
“I discovered a love for complex investment instruments and an aptitude for helping ‘generalist’ investors understand them,” she says. “It is intoxicating to be able to introduce and articulate complicated investment solutions to a sophisticated clientele.”
Later, as an investment consultant in Chicago, she became fascinated with bridging the prevailing academic thinking on portfolio construction with practical execution for tax-exempt institutions. She enrolled in an intensive training program for investment professionals at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Hall had whet her appetite for finance, yet she needed an even deeper understanding of the fundamentals to be able to articulate investment solutions for her clients in laymen’s terms. So, she enrolled in the CFA Program.
“I found it extremely taxing,” she says. “In fact, I almost walked out in the middle of the first-year exam because I was so sure I had failed that I didn’t know why I would spend the next three hours continuing. It was the most demanding thing I had ever done in my life.”
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Hall nevertheless rose to the challenge and completed the Program in just three years. For two of those years, she and her husband studied together well into the night, a team of frenzied professionals. She completed the Program in 1995 and her husband earned his CFA charter just days after Hall gave birth to twins.
Hall attributes the pace of her own success in the investment profession to fortunate timing and her status as a CFA charterholder. “The CFA [designation] has been critical to the trajectory of my career,” she says.
As a young female, Hall often found herself
in meetings with men several years her senior. The initial presumption of naiveté would end when her peers realized she held the CFA designation. “When I would hand somebody my business card [with the CFA on it], it always got me up that credibility curve,” she says. “Where pre-CFA it would take me a good fifteen minutes to get up that credibility curve, post-CFA, I had the presumption of intelligence that is hard to buy or even have conferred by a business title.”
Then, as she began maneuvering her way through the investment profession, she discovered how important being a CFA charterholder can be in securing a new position.
“I hadn’t fully appreciated how the CFA [designation] would separate me in terms of job candidacy. I discovered when I was talking to people about a job that it was extremely important—it was much more powerful than an MBA,” she says. “It was important to them that I had the credentials and the rigorous training involved in the CFA curriculum.”
Moreover, when she and a colleague founded Lighthouse Partners LLC in 1999, the CFA designation became a strong selling point to prospective clients.
“Investors were comforted that even though we might be in a very narrow space,” Hall says, “we had the perspective of the whole investment universe from the training.”
Her words of advice to CFA candidates?
“Embrace the curriculum. Don’t think of it as a chore…fall in love with it. Throw yourself into it and enjoy the opportunity to learn. The great benefit of the CFA Program is that you’re learning relevant material. Everything in the curriculum is relevant, important, and actionable and you should relish the challenge rather than find it intimidating or impossible.”
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