Wall Street Women Awards Winner: Tracy Buell – Crystal Ladder

Crystal Ladder

For women who began in an entry-level job in a financial firm and climbed steadily through the ranks to reach senior management.

Tracy Buell, managing director and head of implementation for global transition management, ConvergEx Group

History often repeats itself.

Thats what Tracy Buell, managing director and head of implementation for global transition management at ConvergEx Group, has discovered since she began on Wall Street in 1990. After rising through the program trading ranks, moving into the international trading business and then into transition management, she is beginning again and looking to add value as ConvergEx modifies that part of its business.

The bulge firms left transition management, as the ongoing commission slump and decline in trading volume has made the business less profitable for them. But it is here where Buell sees an opportunity to carve out a niche for herself and ConvergEx, something she has done in her career since the very beginning.

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Buell began her Wall Street ascent back in 1985, landing a job right out of American University at First New York Equities, a small woman-owned firm, as a trading assistant covering high-net-worth individuals. While the job only lasted a short time, she was on track to bigger and better things, landing an entry-level research assistant position on Kidder Peabodys program trading desk in 1987.

It was there she worked with a team of Harvard-trained academics, performing complex regression analyses to develop new formulas that could accurately predict transaction costs and implementation shortfall. Implementation shortfall was a new concept at that time but prepped her for future Wall Street work.

Little did I know then that Id be using implementation shortfall now at ConvergEx in our transition business, Buell said.

After cutting her teeth on Kidder Peabodys program desk, she moved to James Capel, a London-based broker-dealer, which suddenly lost its entire New York-based international program trading team to a competitor. Buell and Alex Aiello, a colleague at Kidder, immediately pounced on the opportunity to rebuild the program desk.

It was just the two of us, and we did absolutely everything, she said of her Capel days. We would work from 7 a.m. until midnight for weeks on end. We took over the desk, figured it out from the ground up. We were in sync and got along so well. She was good with clients, and I was good at operations-very complementary. While it made for real long days, it was one of the best jobs I ever had.

As a result of her and Aiellos efforts, after just two years of them co-heading the desk, James Capels program desk was named by Greenwich Associates as the top-ranked program trading desk in 1992. Buell was just 29 years old.

She took six years off from the Street to have a family. When she returned to full-time work in 2001, on HSBCs international program trading desk, it was a challenging re-entry, as the trading business underwent rapid technological changes.

Everything had changed. I had to entirely reprove myself, Buell said. I had to get new licenses; it was a totally different operation. And some of her younger staff who were already with the firm were cool to her return, despite her pedigree. I was an outsider.

Undaunted, Buell improvised, adjusted, adapted and overcame. She won the respect of her younger colleagues, tapping her international trading background and taking charge of the working with HSBCs London trading desk.

I made myself a London person and made my name there taking over the business, she said. I added value to the desk that no one else saw.

When she moved to the transitions business at ConvergEx Group in 2004, her role was somewhat undefined, so she used her international trading experience to help grow the group.

I made myself the international person and made my name here by being the point person for coordinating global transitions, she said. I added value to the desk by focusing on a key area of the business that no one else on the desk was focusing on.

Buell was made a managing director at ConvergEx in 2012. Looking back, she credits her success to being able to see where she can add value and figuring out how to do it.

Look for what isnt getting done and make it your own. Define your own position. Be able to thrive in the undefined, she said. One of the best parts about my job now is that every transition we do is different. I still have to figure out every day how to do something that I havent done before.