Sellside Equities Traders
Mary Clark
Firm: WALLACHBETH CAPITAL
Some come to Wall Street with high-end degrees. Others come to work with drive, persistence and a can-do attitude; that description fits Mary Clark, senior vice president for WallachBeth Capital. The sellside equities trader may work on Wall Street now, but she started her career with a summer job after graduating high school as a runner on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. She thought that the job her sister had arranged for her would be temporary, but soon she was hooked.
“I was running tickets – taking tickets from the traders and running them up to the booth. That was pretty exciting, a whole new world,” she recalled of her 1998 job. “I went there for more or less a summer position and I stuck with it. I loved it; it was exciting and a lot was going on.”
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Clark then served as a wire clerk at the Amex for more than six years and became a member of the stock exchange, where she dealt with clients, took orders and processed trades. Working as a broker at Pegasus Partners soon followed, where she was one of the few women to work on the floor of the exchange. As a WallachBeth colleague wrote when nominating Clark for the Traders Wall Street Women award for Equities Trading, “A strong believer in our model of sourcing liquidity for institutional clients through a competitive bidding process, Mary has passionately embraced every challenge and opportunity she has been given. Her in-depth understanding of the way securities trade allows her to be a trusted advisor to our clients, delivering significant price improvement and best execution for our clients.”
Clark loves her job, and pity any obstacle that stands in her way. “People say, ‘You’re a woman ? how do you deal with it?’ It’s a piece of cake,” she told Traders. “My guys treat me no different than they treat each other.”
The mother of two, who recently moved from her childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn to a home with a backyard in New Jersey, wants to stay at WallachBeth Capital, where she sees even more opportunity. Where will she be in five years? “Here, definitely here,” she told Traders.
And her children are impressed. “I stare at six screens each day. I have a 13-year-old, and when he comes into the office he says, ‘Oh my God, Mom, it looks like you work for the FBI here,” she said. “My 7-year-old daughter says she doesn’t know what’s going on, but that it’s great.”
