Diana Kiluta Amoa, is Chief Investment Officer of Kirkoswald, a US based hedge fund, and she formerly spent over a decade in financial services in a range of roles including fixed income and rates trading, with a focus on Emerging Markets. She is a Board Member of the Global Nomads Group among other roles.

Our conversation starts with her upbringing in Kenya, her education in the UK and how she pursued a Masters in African Studies among other post-graduate programs when she became a Rhodes scholar.  We explore what she learned from that – how it enabled her to draw parallels across different disciplines and see issues in context.

We then turn to her extensive career in investing and the various roles that she assumed at different times, involving the coverage of all of Emerging Markets, to setting up fixed income trading functions to setting up an entire business in Africa and being forced to train up counter-parties (also her competition) in order to ensure liquid, well-functioning markets.

We look at the appeal of the asset allocator function and how it relates to being a fiduciary, and examine what that actually means.  We also ask why in emerging markets the support functions provided to women can enable less complicated career paths and ask whether extending similar supports globally would change the trajectory for some professional women.

Series 1 of the 2022 Fiftyfaces Podcast is brought to you with the kind support of Heard Capital, a Chicago-based asset manager invests in public equities in the technology, media, telecommunication, financial and industrial sectors.The firm was founded in 2011 and manages assets via a long/short fund and a long-only fund.