Anne Casscells, co-founder, co-president and chief investment officer, Aetos Alternatives Management

Throughout her career, Anne Casscells has taken opportunities to pivot.

At 36, after stints at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, Casscells was caught up in a round of layoffs after interest rates spiked in 1994. It ended up being a key moment because Casscells realized she was deeply interested in financial planning for institutions.

A graduate of Stanford’s business school, Casscells took the opportunity to pivot, landing a role at Stanford Management Co., responsible for asset allocation, currency overlay, risk management and the hedge fund portfolio. She developed the portable alpha program and rose to serve as CIO.

In 2001, an entrepreneurial opportunity arose and Casscells pivoted again, co-founding Aetos Alternatives Management along with Michael Klein. “There was an opportunity to take this endowment approach and bring it into the institutional world,” she said.

Now, 23 years later, Casscells said the $5.1 billion hedge fund of funds manager is “still largely doing the same thing,” investing based on fundamentals and asking, “where are there true alpha opportunities that you can execute on?”

Casscells is proud of Aetos’ diversity, with women and people of color making up 75% of staff. She said her own identity as a LGBTQ+ woman has helped in terms of recruitment, but that intentionality is also key when hiring, developing and managing people. She stresses “there are advantages to being the outsider,” especially being less susceptible to groupthink.

The progress women have made in finance over the course of her career is “encouraging and disappointing.”

“Alternative markets have really lagged,” she said, pointing to progress made on the support staff and marketing side while on the investment side it has been “disappointingly slow.”

There’s still a lot of work to do to encourage female students in high school to think about investing as a viable career path. “I'm working on this because by the time you're out of college, it's just about too late,” she said.