The die was cast at age 14 for Shannon Spotswood. That is when she came to a momentous decision, rarely heard from the indecisive lips of a teenager: She would pursue a career on Wall Street.

She put an exclamation point on that declaration by asking her parents for a subscription to the Wall Street Journal and started reading financial bestsellers such as Beating the Street by Peter Lynch and Den of Thieves by James Stewart, as well as biographies about John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and other great industrialists.

“I was fascinated by money and the power of money,” Spotswood reminisces. “I was curious how it was made and super interested in investing and how the market works. I wanted to be self-sufficient, to make my own money. I wanted that security. I really never wavered from that.”

In addition to her parents, she was informally aided and abetted by a family friend and political lobbyist named Melanie Stewart, a woman Spotswood considers a second