Welcome to a special Alpha Exchange Retrospective podcast in which I highlight discussions with female guests and their reflections on efforts to empower careers for women in the field of finance. I launched the Alpha Exchange back in 2018 to host conversations with prominent investors, strategists and policymakers that explored the world of market risk. Over the course of these last 5, most interesting years, I’ve been fortunate to engage with 135 individuals, soliciting their perspectives, uncovering their frameworks and asking them to detail the lens through which they evaluate the trade-off between risk and opportunity. Among my guests, 22 have been women. I’m pleased to say that 2023 is already a record year for female guests at 9. These guests are chief investment officers, heads of derivative strategy, hedge fund founders, heads of asset allocation and macro credit research. Female guests of the podcast are, almost always, mothers as well.

I enjoyed putting this together, hoping to highlight what leading women in our industry think about efforts to expand opportunities for females in the investment industry.