Lisa Shalett took a circuitous route to the position of chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.
"I didn't come to Wall Street thinking I'm going to be a chief investment officer," Shalett told American Banker. "My career has always been about trying to excel in the position that I'm in at the minute and seeing what doors that opens for me."
She started her career at the Boston Consulting Group, then spent 12 years at Sanford Bernstein as a sell-side analyst, a director of research and then CEO of the brokerage business at Sanford Bernstein. Then she ran global growth equities at AllianceBernstein.
"I lived through the financial crisis, which a lot of folks didn't," Shalett said. She was forced to fire several friends and colleagues from 2008 to 2010, an experience that still pains her.
"We always underestimate the importance of risk management, and we always think that we're managing all the risks that we can see," she said. "And the reality is that global and systemic risk is sometimes so entrenched and embedded that you become overly conditioned to it. So my big learning is that no matter how much you think you're managing risk, there's always more you can be doing. I don't think it's made me more conservative. I just think it's made me more humble."
Shalett, who oversees 250 employees, translates the firm's market views into guidance for thousands of financial advisors and millions of clients. In 2025, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management made $31.8 billion in net revenues, managed $2.75 trillion in fee-based client assets and brought in $356.3 billion in net new assets.
In addition to helping deliver these results for Morgan Stanley, Shalett made more than 165 media appearances in 2025, including Bloomberg's Masters in Business and outlets such as CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. And she spoke at the 2025 Milken Institute Global Conference on alternative investments and private wealth.
One investment theme she's had her financial advisors focus on in recent months is risk management and the need to rethink passive or exclusively indexed portfolios.
"Indexes tend to overweight the winners of the past," Shalett said. "They're not necessarily the best place to be when markets are undergoing fundamental transformation, with a technology where we don't know who the winners of the next five to 10 years are going to be. That's an environment where you want to be much more of an active stock picker."
This takes the form of actively managing hedge funds for ultra-net-worth and private-client portfolios.
A second theme is around "resource based assets" like commodities, real estate and energy infrastructure.
Shalett does not buy into the common belief that the current investment in data center infrastructure to support AI is a bubble.
"We absolutely think that the boom in spending is going to continue," she said. "We think we're probably in the middle of an eight-year spending cycle, so we've got pretty good visibility out to 2030, 2031."
She does think it's likely there will be overbuilding of data centers. "Whenever there's growth and there's opportunity and there's liquidity and there's ample availability of capital, it chases the highest growth and highest return opportunities, and so we will at some point overbuild what's needed, and then we'll have indigestion," Shalett said.
