Cynthia Harrington, CFA, CFE

Cynthia Harrington, CFA, CFE

Principal
Cynthia Harrington & Associates

Expertise: Behavorial Finance; Neuroeconomics

Email: cynthia@chcoach.com
Office: 310-443-4266

As founder and principal of the eponymous firm, Cynthia uses a coaching process that helps clients grow within their work context, focusing primarily on high performance individuals in finance and entrepreneurs in fast growth trajectories. Clients include hedge funds, executives of both alternative and conventional asset managers, and investors in both.

She achieves measurable success with coaching clients with 100% meeting or exceeding goals. Previously, she founded and managed Harrington Capital Management, a SEC-registered large cap value manager; her firm followed a large cap value style, using a market behavioral model for timing of purchases and sales. Cynthia also advised the high net worth and small institution market at Piper Jaffray and Bear Stearns for twenty years before founding Harrington Capital Management.

Cynthia Harrington, the principal coach, is cited as one of the “fifty prominent authority on performance measurement”. She has thirty years experiences in asset management and is an award winning journalist. She holds the designation of chartered financial analyst (CFA) and Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE). In addition to that, her expertise in fraud examinations and knowledge in behavioral finance have served a cutting-edge niche for Cynthia Harrington & Associates LLC.

An award winning journalist, she has thoroughly researched the firm's target coaching segments, and interviewed thousands of leaders in the respective field such as the two Nobel Prize winners, Vernon Smith and William Sharpe, for articles on behavioral finance and retirement planning, respectively, for CFA Magazine. Over four hundred of her articles appear in publications such as CFA Magazine, Fraud Magazine, Accounting Today, Financial Engineering News, and Journal of Accountancy. Her article "The Value Proposition of Sarbanes Oxley" was cited by the Editorial Board of the Journal of Accountancy as one of the best articles of 2005. She is co-author of the CFA Program textbook Corporate Finance.

Her achievement as a distinguished thought leader in behavioral finance is witnessed when her article “Common Hedge Fund Biases” accomplished the 4th most read entry at Finance Professionals’ Post of the NY Society Security Analysts. Her feature articles on behavioral finance were well received, including "Beyond Belief: Pioneering Insights into Behavioral Finance" which appeared in Sept.-Oct. 2003; "Best Behavior"  in March 2006; “Mind Games” on behavioral decision making in January 2010, in CFA Magazine. She was also on the Board of the Applied Behavioral Finance Group, a special interest group affiliated with CFALA. Within ABFG, she was active in attracting speakers who are doing original research in behavioral finance and neuroeconomics.

Cynthia is also an expert in the behavioral aspects of fraud. Besides writing for Fraud Magazine, she also wrote the self-study course "Financial Statement Fraud" for the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. She is often invited to deliver speech on integrating the behavioral finance knowledge in detecting frauds in corporations. Among the speeches she gave are “Five Reasons Why We (Usually) Miss Fraud Signals?” hosted by CFA San Francisco Society. She has also taught the subject to auditors in the alternative investment group at Marcum LLP, entitled "Using Behavioral Finance to Mitigate Fraud Risk” and consults with hedge funds on protecting against and profiting from fraud.

Cynthia started the 100 Women in Hedge Funds group in Los Angeles. She has 300 skydives and credits her instinctive sense of risk management to the sport.
 

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