Overcoming a Toxic Resume

Would you buy into a new hedge fund being formed by a former Countrywide Financial executive? Susan Estes sure hopes so.

Estes ran one of the trading desks at Countrywide for four years before abandoning ship to launch a new hedge fund called Zetian Capital. She's out marketing her new fund now, and she's desperately trying to distinguish her own reputation from that of the embattled mortgage lender where she was a managing director.

"I was hired by Countrywide to set up the company's non-mortgage trading businesses, so my focus was not on anything that's been in the press," she told the trade pub FINAlternatives.

Indeed, Estes ran the U.S. Treasury and bond trading desks for Countrywide. About 80 percent of the new fund will invest in global fixed income products and "will be focused on the most liquid products, so if it does not have a mark available, or if there's no price available, we will not trade it," she said. She believes that shifts made by the Federal Reserve have opened up new investment opportunities.

Rewriting a resume is unfortunately out of the question at this point, so Estes is best advised to keep her head high and her connections to Angelo Mozilo to a minimum.

Perhaps she's taking a page from the Chinese empress Wu Zetian, who shares the name of her new hedge fund.

The beautiful ruler broke all precedents when she became the first female ruler of her own dynasty in 690. Nastiness ensued, and she was eventually overthrown in a coup.

According to Wikipedia, Wu Zetian "was used by the Chinese establishment as an example of what can go wrong when a woman is placed in charge." That all changed in the 1960s, when modern rulers made an effort to remove the sexist opposition so many Chinese had held against her for so long.

The moral of the story seems to be that if you hang on long enough, people will forget where you came from and remember you for your success.

by Megan Barnett