S10 BARRON’S September 16, 2019
2019 Firm Rank: 50
Lisette Cooper
Athena Capital Advisors
T
HE STORY BEHIND LISETTE COOPER’S $5.8
billion advisory business, Athena Capital
Advisors, begins in the sterile laborato-
ries at Harvard University, where she studied
isotope geochemistry. She earned her Ph.D., but
found she wasn’t suited to the solitude and quiet
of a laboratory setting. So she enrolled in classes
at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and
eventually became drawn to a starkly different
environment—the trading floor at Merrill Lynch,
cheek by jowl with colleagues, rewarded for both
her math brilliance and social acuity.
After Merrill, Cooper built risk-controlled
investment strategies for MSCI Barra until
1993, when she launched Lincoln, Mass.–based
Athena with a book of institutional business.
Cooper took some time to chat withBarron’s
about how she pivoted her firm away from its
institutional origins, and what’s next.
Barron’s: RIAs are getting squeezed competitively.
Big, established banks and brokerages have been
emphasizing their advisory services, while finan-
cial-technology start-ups are offering cheap in-
vestment services. How are you coping?
Cooper:Advisors are under pressure to show
they have value-add. A lot of individual investors
have gone with passive investment approaches
because active managers are having a hard time
making more than their fees. We’ve had to adapt
how we deliver active managements. We’ve had
to change our style of investing somewhat.
How so?
We start with a core of cheap and tax-efficient
investments, like a tax-managed U.S. large-cap
fund, then supplement that with active managers
with concentrated portfolios—maybe 25 names—
that deviate more from their benchmark.
Have you made any tactical investment changes
in response to recent economic concerns?
We’ve shifted some [domestic and foreign] eq-
uity assets to quality managers—those investing
in companies in good positions, with low debt,
growing dividends, and a reasonable price.
Those types of managers do better in volatile
environments. But we’re long-term investors
and pretty much sticking to our asset allocation.
After the [stock] downdraft late last year,
clients are pretty nervous. There has been a lot
of hand-holding. If they want to take risk off the
table, we take just a little off. When volatility
picks up and investors take all their chips off the
table—that’s when people really hurt themselves.
Part of the job is to help them stay on course.
What about fixed income and alternatives?
We have shifted our fixed-income exposure to
higher quality. We have no high-yield right now.
And we’ve been gradually adjusting our hedge
Lisette Cooper
PHOTOGRAPH BY KARIN MICHELE DAILEY