Sloane Ortel On Building A Better Finance Industry

Sloane Ortel is a rarity in finance. She and I met a few years ago through our day jobs, and I remember even then being drawn to her view of the industry, which is at once critical and optimistic. 

Her vision of the finance industry is one that is more creative, ethical and strange, and has less, as she puts it, “sweater vests in skyscrapers.” Sloane now works as a consultant for financial institutions. She runs a podcast called Free Money and writes a column for CityWire.  

Sloane talked with She Spends about how she’s coping with living in Brooklyn during the coronavirus pandemic, transitioning while working in finance, and how getting sober got her into comedy.

(Note: the interview has been condensed and edited for clarity)

How are things? How are you holding up? 
I was really lucky to have a great work from home set up and being used to doing it. My incoming work has slowed to a crawl. I’ve been spending most of my time keeping in touch with people, making art and getting distracted from what’s going on.

I started doing something like telephone but with art, where someone creates something, shares it, and the next person reinterprets the work. That’s been going on for a couple of weeks. I also started doing these Powerpoint parties that are so fucking fun. (editor’s note: more on those later).

It feels like financial time keeps going, but actual time has stopped entirely. It’s a total clusterfuck. It’s affirming that everyone is going through it, though. Getting through this means staying entertained and staying sane.

How did you get into finance? 
Finance is sort of like the family business. My mom was a sales trader at Salomon Brothers and my dad was an investment banker. They would talk about work a lot. We would wind up talking about operational issues at a portfolio company over dinner. 

When I was getting ready to graduate high school, my family basically went broke and I just needed to get a job. So I got a gig at Oppenheimer after registering with the SEC, which is kind of terrifying to think about now. I kind of was acutely aware of the charade that is expertise on Wall Street. 

I eventually wound up getting involved with my dad who, similar to me, had $0 and needed to start making money. He started doing his own sell-side research, and I started working for him. This was in 2008. I wound up kind of ethically confused. I was looking for more moral clarity in the financial system and my place inside of it. I eventually wound up finding a job at CFA Institute.

Tell me about your podcast, Free Money. 
I have this friend Ashby, and we had been going back and forth via email for a long time about all of these weird, unexamined norms in the finance industry. For an industry that sells differentiated judgment, they all sure do dress alike. We were noticing all of these explicit and implicit pressures to conform and thought about how we’d best examine them. We thought about doing a Ph.D. thesis, but we wound up going toward a podcast. We just finished season one of the podcast.

You started transitioning while working for the CFA Institute. Tell me about that experience. 
It’s funny, the way that I think about it now. The closet is an echo chamber that can take any small fear and make it into a crippling obsession. I was in a somewhat public position there, and the second I sort of resolved to come out, and I realized people would notice. It’s sort of like going through puberty again while being responsible for being a pulled together adult. 

It’s certainly been an interesting adventure and now I’m having fun with it. If I were to talk to myself before coming out, that person would be very surprised that I’m still friends with the same people now. My reality was very warm and fuzzy. It’s what you really wish it would be for everyone. This should be a minor administrative matter in the ideal world. Unfortunately, this is not the case. 

I’m talking with another trans woman in finance today on Twitter and they were like, “are there others of us?” And I said, “Yeah there’s four or five. It’s a rarity and an unexpected quantity.”

In the finance world, what do you want to see changed?
I think primarily the perception that it’s a wholly quantitative and rational space is keeping a lot of interesting people out of the industry. There are folks out there who are obsessed with fairness and a lot of those people could be really good investors. They wind up getting pushed out by this weird fetish this industry has for STEM-centric fonts of knowledge and insight where the idea is that productive smartness comes from having an engineering background, rather than being creative. A lot of people see it as a great way to make a lot of money really fast or as an arcane thing to do while wearing a sweater vest in a skyscraper. I think that’s a shame. 

Tell me about how you got into doing live comedy
About eleven months ago, I decided to get sober. I had a lot of time all of a sudden, and a lot of energy. I always thought comedy would be fun, and it turns out that it is. There’s a great queer comedy scene that’s active whenever you want to be active. It’s a great opportunity to convene with other folks. You can go off about things that you don’t have a place to talk about elsewhere. 

It’s probably my second favorite hobby to skiing, which I’m absolutely gay for. I started skiing in diapers. I had this crazy experience at my first boarding school where I got outed. I wound up isolating myself and not really talking to anyone. The only thing that sparked joy was skiing. The school had its own ski hill and I found this bright light in skiing. It eventually paid for part of my college. I recently made the call to get back into it. It’s not as competitive as it was in college, but there’s a nice satisfying objectivity to ski racing. I like going fast.

Back to those Powerpoint parties…
So if you participate, you have to give a Powerpoint presentation, and it must be funny and/or weird. I’ve done two so far. It just got picked up by the Armory, so they’ll host it on their Zoom platform next Tuesday at 6 p.m. ET (you can email Sloane for the deets!). On the last one my cousin did a presentation about worshiping Glycon, the snake god. It’s literally a snake with a mullet that was worshiped in the Roman empire. My cousin was able to use a lot of really funky, religious arguments to bolster the case for it. 

I did one where I pitched my startup to help people deliver revenge as a service. It’s an opportunity to be silly and hang out with other people. It’s been really nice to have. 

Do you have any advice for our readers? 
I have been going through the process of building my own consultancy. I had a really hard time pricing myself and I wound up being able to charge rates that were substantially higher than I would have imagined. I followed a heuristic where I’d double my rate for each subsequent client. It worked fine. I guess it arguably shouldn’t have. I think that when you’re dealing with pricing yourself in an arbitrary situation, it’s worth asking for more. You, dear reader, should try that too.