Since childhood, Stacey Cunningham loved math and science, so after high school, she went to study industrial engineering at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. In 1994, while still a student, Cunningham looked for a summer job as a waitress, but no place would hire her due to lack of experience. Her father, a trader at a brokerage firm, arranged for her a summer internship at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Two years later, and after receiving her Bachelor’s degree, Cunningham was hired for a full-time job at the NYSE as a trading floor clerk, becoming one of the few dozen women on the floor among the thousand male employees. For the next 8 years, she worked as a specialist for the Bank of America.
At 31, Cunningham decided that she wants to become a better cook, so in 2005 she left the NYSE to study at the Institute of Culinary Education and worked as a restaurant chef. In 2007, she returned to the finance field as director of capital markets at the Nasdaq stock exchange and soon got promoted to Head of Sales for US transaction services. In 2012, Cunningham returned to the NYSE, first as vice president of sales and relationship management and then as the head of the division. In 2014, she was appointed president of NYSE Governance Services. In the following year, at the age of 41, she was appointed Chief Operating Officer, managing the exchange’s equities, internal governance services, and exchange-traded products.
In 2018, at the age of 43, Cunningham was nominated the 67th president of the NYSE, becoming the second woman president of the New York Stock Exchange and the first to have full leadership of the exchange. In this position, Cunningham oversees the exchange’s operations for its issuers, investors, and global financial institutions, assuring the exchange’s constant improvement and innovation.
This post is also available in:
Español
This post is also available in:
Español
