Kathleen Moriarty, a lawyer who played an instrumental role in the creation of the first exchange-traded fund, has died. She was 69.
Her death was announced by Chapman and Cutler LLP in New York, where she was senior counsel in the corporate and securities department. No cause or other details were provided.
Moriarty spent almost 30 years breaking ground in the fastest-growing segment of the money-management industry, guiding products to market such as the first hedge-fund replicator, the first physical commodity ETF and the first leveraged offering.
ETFs are low-cost investment vehicles that track an index or a basket of securities and trade like equities on an exchange. Moriarty built a reputation as the go-to lawyer for anyone seeking to sell an innovative ETF that regulators may scrutinize closely.
"I've represented most everybody who's done an unusual ETF," Moriarty said in a 2014 interview.
She earned the nickname "SPDR Woman" for her work on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (ticker SPY), which State Street Corp. introduced in 1993, and on subsequent SPDR products. With $357 billion in assets, SPY currently reigns as the largest and oldest ETF in the $6.5 trillion industry.
"Kathleen was a pioneer in the investment management industry and was at the forefront of some of our industry's most impactful innovation of the last 30 years," Morrison Warren, co-leader of Chapman's Investment Management Practice Group, said in a statement. "Throughout her time at Chapman, she was a humble and thoughtful colleague and universally recognized as a kind-hearted and beloved individual."
