Success in Investment Management: Spotlight on Kira Connors ’07, MBA ’12

Kira Connors is a fixed income analyst at Wellington Management, responsible for coverage of the global investment-grade consumer, food, beverage, and tobacco sectors as well as the US investment-grade retail sector. She performs fundamental credit analysis and formulates investment recommendations on corporate bond issuers. She is a member of a team that manages the fixed income credit research portfolios.

Connors’s choice to attend Cornell University for her undergraduate and graduate degrees was deliberate. She grew up in Ithaca, so she knew firsthand the tight-knit community that the university fosters. In an interview with the Parker Center for Investment Research, she shared why she chose to attend the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management and how the investment research track at the school launched and shaped her career.

Pre-MBA work experience

After earning her undergraduate degree in applied economics and management at Cornell, Connors worked as a financial advisor for Ameriprise Financial Services. Her role at Ameriprise was a great introduction to the world of finance, she says, but it was a “jack-of-all-trades” finance job. She gained experience in making asset allocation recommendations as a part of a team of advisors. By evaluating different mutual funds, she learned what investment research analysts did, and this career path piqued her interest. She realized that she wanted to pivot into investment research, but she lacked the knowledge, training, and skills needed to successfully transition into this role, which led her to consider an MBA.

Connors researched the Johnson School and found it was a great fit for her career aspirations. “The prestige of the MBA program, the ability to manage real money through the Cayuga Fund, and the Park Leadership Fellows Program are what drew me back to Cornell for my MBA,” she says.

Connors went into Johnson’s MBA program with a clear direction. She wanted to work in the investment management industry. Due to her prior experience in finance, she recognized the need to gain the skills required to be a successful professional investor. To build those investing skills, she joined the Cayuga Fund, a student-managed, faculty-directed fund that provides Cornell MBA students with the opportunity to manage real money as part of a capstone class in applied portfolio management. Her experience in the fund and her participation in the Parker Center’s flagship Women in Investing (WIN) conference, where she represented Cornell University on the stock pitching team, landed her a summer internship with Putnam Investments as a fixed income analyst. In this role, she researched and analyzed companies within the restaurant sector and made investment recommendations across the capital structure for each company. That internship led to a full-time job offer following graduation.

Following a six-year tenure at Putnam, Connors joined Wellington Management in 2018. Outside of her core responsibilities, she enjoys meeting with clients, mentoring others at the firm, and recruiting new talent.

The excitement and challenges of a career in investment management

As Connors progressed in her career, she learned that curiosity and resilience are among the many important qualities necessary to be a successful fixed income analyst. Analysts must have a sense of curiosity to explore and question the factors that drive a company’s performance. The most successful analysts strive to peel the layers of the onion to formulate their investment recommendation, she says.

“The market moves every day and tells you sort of where you’re right and where you’re wrong,” Connors says. And analysts are wrong—a lot, which is where resilience comes in. Connors points out that the greatest analysts are right 55% to 60% of the time. When the market moves against analysts, they face a decision. They must either double down on their investment because the price is even more attractive or acknowledge that their thesis is not playing out the way they forecasted and cut their losses.

In her investment research career, Connors appreciates that every day is different and exciting. Due to the dynamic nature of the work, investment research roles keep professionals engaged and interested.

Connors concluded with a piece of advice for students pursuing investment research roles: “Career paths are not linear, so even if you have your heart set on one specific role or industry or company and you don’t end up there right away, look into alternatives that will help put you in a better position to eventually arrive at your dream job when that role becomes available.”

About the author

Emily Ravet is a center coordinator at the Parker Center for Investment Research in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. Prior to working at Cornell, she was a program assistant in the evening and executive MBA programs at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ravet obtained a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.