Meredith Adler

I managed to get a job at Citibank and started with a project job, then got a full-time job in the credit card business where I spent about 3 years. I briefly had a job as the communications director of the credit card business, but I decided that I wanted to actually have a finance job, so I started getting my MBA at night. I owe Citibank a big thanks because they paid for it. I also basically talked my way into a credit training program, which was 9 months and paid, and I learned a tremendous amount. Then I became a commercial lender and did that for a couple of years. I finished my MBA full-time for just a semester by taking a leave of absence. I then moved into high yield as a bond analyst and did that for 10 years, working at a number of different places. I found high yield to be really a cowboy culture, a very new market with not a lot of rules and very sexist, so I decided to move to equities, which was a more established and much bigger market. I made the right guess that it was going to be a more professional market, and it was. The first place I went to work was Lehman Brothers. When I was in high yield, I worked at 4 different places over 10 years because sometimes I got a better deal and sometimes it was just too horrible to work at. I then stayed at Lehman, and if they hadn't gone bankrupt, I would have been there for the next 20 years. Since almost all the people I worked with even after the bankruptcy were Lehman people, I could basically say I was in the Lehman culture for 20 years. Despite the fact that they went bankrupt, it was a really great place to work, they really cared about people. One of the advantages of being an equity analyst is that Institutional Investor Magazine performed a poll of big institutional investors asking them who the best analysts were in every category. I was in food and drug retailing, and I ranked as the number one analyst in that poll for 14 years in a row. It felt really good. Then I saw myself slipping and decided it was time to retire. I really, honestly, came to hate the stock market. My joke about the stock market is that when I started, it was like a neurotic teenager, and by the time I retired, it was a neurotic teenager on drugs.