CMRA in the Press 2006

Seeing Through It

In an August 2004 letter to Senator Michael Crapo, an Idaho Republican, Greenspan said the information reported to the SEC would be of "little value." Bernanke's approach was not completely hands-off. He said banks and brokers needed to improve their understanding of their risk in some complex transactions, test the risks better with computer models and link terms of credit more clearly to a hedge fund's transparency about its strategies and risk profile.

"It's a very responsible position," said Leslie Rahl, president of Capital Market Risk Advisors, a risk advisory firm in New York. "His observations about potential counterparty exposure being larger than is recognized by individual hedge funds is something that I've been concerned about, and I was glad to see it on his agenda."
(October 17, 2006)

Leslie Rahl, Capital Market Risk Advisors: Career Path
By Maureen Nevin Duffy

Unique at the time, Capital Markets Risk Advisors offered risk analysis of investment models and advised boards on risk governance. She attributes the success of the business to her ability to act as a translator in a complex world. "I can talk quants and models, but I can also talk governance and (about) what trustees and senior managers need to know, and what institutional investors worry about. I can work at both the quant level and the strategic level," she says.
(October 4, 2006)

Changing the World, One Tiny Loan at a Time
By Liz Peek

Why has microfinance become the hot topic of the philanthropy set? A conversation with two successful veterans of the rough-and-tumble hedge fund industry, Leslie Rahl and Leslie Lake, sheds some light.

Ms. Rahl, who once ran Citibank's derivatives business and now heads up Capital Market Risk Advisors, and Ms. Lake, who manages the hedge fund portfolio of the Invus Group, have earned their stripes in the financial world. Both are intense and tend to verbally dissect financial problems at a dizzying pace. Certainly, neither could be described as a soft touch.

Nonetheless, as founding members of a group called High Water Women, they have raised $1 million over the past 12 months to be given to a variety of charities in the New York region that assist women and children. They are just getting started.More recently, they have gotten caught up in the microfinance juggernaut, hosting three symposiums on the topic that drew standing room-only crowds.
(August 10, 2006)

Inside Wall Street's Culture Of Risk
Investment banks are placing bigger bets than ever and beating the odds -- at least for now
By Emily Thornton, with David Henry in New York and Adrienne Carter in Chicago

How the markets will respond to such an event "is up in the air," says Leslie Rahl, president and founder of Capital Market Risk Advisors Inc., a New York-based consultancy. That's because banks are dealing more with unpredictable clients like hedge funds and in less familiar financial products like derivatives of derivatives. They also use any number of risk models whose predictions vary wildly depending on the assumptions.
(June 12, 2006)

Bernanke Adopts Greenspan's Opposition to Hedge-Fund Regulation
By Craig Torres and Scott Lanman

In an August 2004 letter to Senator Michael Crapo, an Idaho Republican, Greenspan said the information reported to the SEC would be of "little value." Bernanke's approach was not completely hands-off. He said banks and brokers needed to improve their understanding of their risk in some complex transactions, test the risks better with computer models and link terms of credit more clearly to a hedge fund's transparency about its strategies and risk profile.

"It's a very responsible position," said Leslie Rahl, president of Capital Market Risk Advisors, a risk advisory firm in New York. "His observations about potential counterparty exposure being larger than is recognized by individual hedge funds is something that I've been concerned about, and I was glad to see it on his agenda."
(May 18, 2006)

How to get on a board
By Pallavi Gogoi

Understanding board dynamics by serving on an influential nonprofit board is another route to corporate boards, says Leslie Rahl, president of derivatives consulting firm Capital Market Risk Advisors. Rahl spent 19 years at Citibank – nine of them as co-head of the bank's derivatives group. Rahl was tapped in 2004 to serve as a director at Fannie Mae, the mortgage services company, which was looking for someone with knowledge of derivatives, in which Fannie Mae invests. But Rahl was surprised to find that none of the interviews for the position focused on her derivatives experience. "Many of the questions were about my experience of serving at a nonprofit board and how I handled situations there," says Rahl, who recently founded High Water Women, a nonprofit public charity that makes donations to philanthropies supporting homeless families, education, at-risk teens and young women's health.
(April/May 2006)

Profile: Leslie Rahl, SB '71, SM '72

Inventor of such groundbreaking investment strategies as the "swaption" and the "collar," Leslie Rahl has made a career out of applying her creativity to complicated business problems.

Now, for the past 15 years, she has had her own business consulting primarily in the area of derivatives and hedge funds, and she seems to finally have struck that perfect balance.

These days, she has entered what she calls "the plural phase" of her career. In addition to running her business, in her spare time she sits on the Fanny Mae board, the MIT investment board, and the New York State common advisory board (a $120 billion pension fund). She chairs a philanthropic foundation called High Water Women and also finds time to occasionally give a "pro-seminar" in the MIT Engineering program.
(Spring/Summer 2006)