Industry Trailblazer
This award is presented to high-performing Wall Street women who broke the gender barrier when it came to trading and advancing up the career ladder on the buyside and sellside. These trailblazers forged the opportunity for other women to become traders, managers and successful financial professionals.
Johanna Rossi, senior trader, Alden Global
They call her the Distressed Diva.
Born to trade, always ready to hit a bid or lift an offering, Johanna Rossi, is a traders trader. And she has been since she was 4 years old.
She got her taste of Wall Street and trading at that age, when her dad taught her how to view and read stock quotes in the newspaper. He explained to her that a plus next to a name was good, and a minus was bad.
My dad would come home from working in NYC late every night and I would anxiously wait up for him, just to read the quotes, Rossi said. I would pull the daily stock quotes from the newspaper-memorize how much his small portfolio of stocks did for the day and rattle off whether Zenith or LTV was up or down for the day, where it closed, then I was off to bed.
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Fast-forward four decades later and Rossi is still doing the same thing-rattling off bids, offers and giving market color. She specializes in trading distressed securities-junk-such as reorganized private equity, pink sheet stocks and high yield bonds. And every day she approaches her job with the same zeal that got her to Alden Global and managing its domestic desk of approximately $1.8 billion in assets.
From a young age, she was asked about why she wanted to be in finance, why she wanted to trade. Her peers told her to be a teacher or nurse. Or theyd tell her there were no women on Wall Street, let alone women traders. Rossi would have none of it.
I knew early on I wanted to be a trader, Rossi said, and majored in finance in college. I could tell you time and time again through high school and college, people would try to squash my dream of becoming a trader. My answer was always, Anything is possible when you have a passion for it.
The more people questioned her, the harder she worked toward trading. Rossi graduated magna cum laude and went straight on to a graduate fellowship program to earn an MBA in corporate finance at Fairleigh Dickinson University. In 1995, she landed her first trading job at NatWest Bank, becoming an assistant foreign currency trader. For her, it was no small feat. She credits Peter Nielsen, who now is co-chief executive officer for markets at RBS, with giving her a chance.
When interviewing me at NatWest, he said I could have the job on the desk but I had to interview with 12 people first, Rossi said. And they all had to say yes.
They did. She got the job and stayed at NatWest for three years. She moved to the buyside at Oppenheimer Capital in 1998 as an international equity trader, hedging their funds FX exposure. After a brief stint at Schwab, she joined Alden Capital in 2003 where she is responsible for best execution in myriad asset classes such as U.S./international equity, U.S./international debt, program trading, forex, options and commodities.
If she could trade washing machines, shed do it. Thats how much Rossi loves trading.
I wake up every morning grateful and passionate about my career, she said. I love trading so much that it doesnt seem like work. I am very fortunate to be living my dream.
