Samara Cohen

Chief Investment Officer of ETF and Index Investments

Samara Cohen, Senior Managing Director, is BlackRock’s Chief Investment Officer of ETF and Index Investments and a member of the firm’s Global Executive Committee (GEC).

As CIO for ETF and Index Investments, Samara leads the teams delivering the market quality and investment integrity of roughly $6.6 trillion of BlackRock’s index funds and iShares ETFs. Encompassing portfolio managers, risk managers, platform architects, and market structure developers, her teams continuously pursue better ways for clients to access expanding investment opportunities and seek to lead in the modernization of the indexing industry and ETF markets.

Samara is a member of the GEC Investment Subcommittee and the GEC Talent Subcommittee. She is also the GEC sponsor for BlackRock’s Women’s Initiative & Allies Network (WIN) and a member of the Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Steering Committee.

Prior to rejoining BlackRock in 2015, Samara was a Managing Director in the Securities Division of Goldman Sachs, where she built and led the Global Market Transition team to develop and deliver solutions to clients in the evolving market structure and regulatory environment following the 2008 global financial crisis. Samara first joined BlackRock in 1993 as an analyst in the Institutional Client Business.

Samara has been recognized for her leadership in the financial services industry. In 2023, she was named one of American Banker’s Most Powerful Women in Finance and she has been honored as one of Barron’s Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance in 2022, 2023, and 2024. She is a member of the Board of the Directors for the Securities Industry Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), and a member of the Board of the BlackRock Foundation.

Samara is passionate about the impact teachers have on students and communities. She is an engaged alumna of the Brearley School and served on its Board of Trustees from 2008-2015. Currently, she serves on the Board of Advisors for the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

She earned a BS Econ in Finance from the Wharton School and a BA in Theatre Arts from the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Jul 14, 2016

Samara Cohen, U.S. Head of iShares Capital Markets for BlackRock, explains why the financial services industry is headed for an exchange traded fund (ETF) revolution.

My name is Samara Cohen, I am the US Head of Capital Markets for iShares by BlackRock. We work with broker dealers, market makers, exchanges and, of course, our clients to give them trade ideas, talk about the market and optimize their experience using iShares ETFs.

I came to BlackRock right out of college. It was a much smaller firm, it was about 130 people when I started here. And BlackRock was really a fixed income specialist at the time and I was very interested in the fixed income markets and interest rates and the balance sheets of countries, and I worked at BlackRock for four years and then went back to business school and then decided I was really interested in going and seeing what life was like on a big fixed income trading floor. So, I went to do that and I was on a big fixed income trading floor for about 16 years and I experienced a lot of change in the fixed income markets. All of it was very exciting, but at the end of it, or I guess towards the end of that 16 years what I really wanted to do for the next leg of my career was be part of building a better financial system. A more robust, safer, more efficient financial system.

What really makes me want to come to work every day is figuring out new ways to help clients execute on their strategies and access markets and achieve the exposures they want in their portfolios whether those clients are big institutions or individual investors.

I really spent my first year here immersing myself in ETF mechanics, product knowledge, industry knowledge, getting to know equity market structure 'cause my background was really entirely on the fixed income side and I realized, at the end of the year that we are in very early stages of, what I think of as the ETF revolution and how ETFs will really transform financial markets to make them more robust, more efficient, and, most of all, more accessible to all investors.

My name is Samara Cohen, I am the US Head of Capital Markets for iShares by BlackRock. We work with broker dealers, market makers, exchanges and, of course, our clients to give them trade ideas, talk about the market and optimize their experience using iShares ETFs.

I came to BlackRock right out of college. It was a much smaller firm, it was about 130 people when I started here. And BlackRock was really a fixed income specialist at the time and I was very interested in the fixed income markets and interest rates and the balance sheets of countries, and I worked at BlackRock for four years and then went back to business school and then decided I was really interested in going and seeing what life was like on a big fixed income trading floor. So, I went to do that and I was on a big fixed income trading floor for about 16 years and I experienced a lot of change in the fixed income markets. All of it was very exciting, but at the end of it, or I guess towards the end of that 16 years what I really wanted to do for the next leg of my career was be part of building a better financial system. A more robust, safer, more efficient financial system.

What really makes me want to come to work every day is figuring out new ways to help clients execute on their strategies and access markets and achieve the exposures they want in their portfolios whether those clients are big institutions or individual investors.

I really spent my first year here immersing myself in ETF mechanics, product knowledge, industry knowledge, getting to know equity market structure 'cause my background was really entirely on the fixed income side and I realized, at the end of the year that we are in very early stages of, what I think of as the ETF revolution and how ETFs will really transform financial markets to make them more robust, more efficient, and, most of all, more accessible to all investors.