[ by Melanie Gretchen ]

Traders Magazine issues annually its Industry Trailblazer Awards to professional women on Wall Street who have "forged the opportunity for other women to become traders, managers and successful financial professionals."  Put another way, Traders Magazine recognizes "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."  

And for 2012, the winners are:

Janice McFadden, Managing Director for Goldman Sachs Asset Management
Donna Sims Wilson, Executive Vice President for Castle Oak Securities LP.

Their career profiles, achievements and photos are provide  below.

    TM Industry Trailblazer Award Winner:  Janice McFadden
Length of Career:  22 years.
Current Firm:   The Goldman Sachs Group
Prior Firms:   None
Status:    Director, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs Asset Management

Ms. McFadden has come a long way from trainee to trading desk chief.  After she joined the firm in 1990, she recorded P&L for the arbitrage desk while studying for an MBA.  A few years later she was offered a job as an assistant trader, despite never having thought of it.

"It was very hard the first four months of trading.  After the first three or four months I didn't think I was getting this. I went from knowing what I was doing to the low person on the pole."  Five months later, "it clicked."  What's needed to fulfill her role?  The ability to multi-task and be in constant with clients throughout the day, she said.

"A person must be persistent in continuing to develop skills and learn to be a problem solver, a team player and a good communicator with clients."

TM Industry Trailblazer Award Winner:  Donna Sims Wilson
Length of Career:  25 years
Current Firm:   CastleOak Securities
Prior Firms:  Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, Loop Capital Markets, M.R. Beal & Company, Bear Stearns
Status:  Director, Executive Vice President

Ms. Wilson wasn't interested in Wall Street until she took a summer job at Salomon at 19.  Despite never having been a higher-mathematics whiz, she said her considerable ability to memorize formulas helped her.

"The trading floor at Salomon Brothers was a huge rush and I kind of knew instinctively that this was where I was supposed to be."

Following college, she became a corporate junior analyst at Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, where she traded junk bonds and defined herself as a problem solver.  As an associate at Bear Stearns selling mortgage-backed securities, Wilson made lots of sales Bear Stearns selling mortgage-backed securities in the mid-1980s.

After attending a Congressional Black Caucus Brain Trust meeting, she learned that a Resolution Trust Corporation law required women- and minority-owned firms to participate in thrift assets dispositions, which led to her current position.  From there, she worked on a joint venture with a minority firm on behalf of Bear Stearns;  today, her firm is a partnership between Cantor Fitzergerald and a minority-owned brokerage, CastleOak Securities, where she runs the mortgage and equity departments. 

For further details, go to [Traders Magazine, 11/19/12].