Stephen L. ShirleyStephen L. Shirley

Executive Director

Wealth Advisor

Stephen Shirley is an Executive Director and Wealth Advisor at J.P. Morgan Wealth Management. He works alongside his son, Travis, and their Client Associate, Lauren (Bauer) Vasquez, to develop and deliver investment strategies for the team's client base.

Throughout his distinguished 45-year career, Steve has been a passionate student of the stock market. His focus is investing for income generation, with an emphasis on growth stocks, especially technology and biotechnology firms. He utilizes J.P. Morgan's strong research platform and his own investment experience to help formulate tailored strategies and recommend a course of action. His approach takes current income, tax considerations and lending into account to address short- and long-term wealth management needs. Steve's father was a cotton broker and was the inspiration for Steve's lifelong interest in securities and commodities. While still very young, he opened his first brokerage account in Fresno, California, at E. F. Hutton, with a purchase of Ford Motor Company on the IPO.

Over the course of his long and storied career, Steve has held significant managerial and brokerage positions that were an outgrowth of his first financial services position as a stock broker trainee at Shearson Hammill in 1967. He moved to Kidder Peabody in 1971 to help establish its Newport Beach office and was promoted to Manager there in 1975. He transferred to New York in 1988 to become National Sales Marketing Manager and serve as a member of Kidder's Capital Commitment Review Committee.

Prudential hired Steve to establish and manage a Corporate Services Office in 1993, and in 1997, he left to launch and manage Hambrecht & Quist's Newport Beach office. He moved to CIBC Oppenheimer in January 2002 to continue his focus on investing in the stock and bond markets on behalf of his clients, and quickly assumed the additional responsibility of Resident Manager. In 2014, Steve joined J.P. Morgan in Newport Beach in order to expand the Registered Investment Advisor aspect of his business.

Steve has twice been selected as one of the Top 10 Managers in the United States by On Wall Streetmagazine. He considers himself lucky to be doing something he loves, and his passion and enthusiasm for the overall investment process are his hallmarks.

Originally a college student at the Colorado School of Mines, Steve graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a B.S. in Finance and is an honorary member of the Marshall School of Business at USC. He and his wife, Karen, live in Laguna Beach and have a second home in Jackson, Wyoming, where he enjoys fly fishing and golf.

Steve is the owner of the foremost collection of Yellowstone memorabilia, including a vintage 1936 Yellowstone Park bus, which he had restored in Bozeman, Montana. He is also a noted collector of pre-World War I Black Forest antiques.