As Wall Street navigates volatile markets, fewer deals, and plummeting company valuations, we take a look at the players rising up despite the challenges and grasping opportunities as they see them.
Insider has pinpointed the young professionals on the runway to success even as banks and money managers brace for cutbacks. One invests in space ventures, another executes multibillion-dollar trades. Some up-and-comers are pushing their teams to the top of industry rankings, and many are immigrants climbing the ranks at major institutions infusing diverse ideas into their decision-making.
We scoured our contacts for ideas about individuals to include and received recommendations from bosses, colleagues, recruiters, and financial-industry peers. To be eligible, we asked that nominees be based in or around New York City, be 35 or under, and be distinguished in some way from the pack. The editors made final decisions.
Insider talked to these rising stars, from leading firms like Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and Bridgewater, to reflect on their successes, challenges, and best career advice.
Akash Pradhan, 33, TPG
When Akash Pradhan needs to clear his head, the 6'1" principal at TPG heads to the basketball court.
The Golden State Warriors fan's love of sports led him to his first job with The Raine Group. The UC Berkeley graduate joined the boutique-investment bank in 2011 despite not knowing much about what the firm did because of The Raine Group's focus on sports, media, and entertainment, he told Insider.
As an analyst at Raine, the company exposed Pradhan to M&A advisory and private-equity investing. He realized he preferred the latter.
"I realized that giving advice as an investment banker and investing your own money are very, very different jobs, and require different things," he told Insider.
He left Raine for TPG in 2013 and has been with the $127 billion private-equity firm ever since, aside from a stint at Harvard Business School to get his MBA. Promoted to the role of principal in January 2022, Pradhan helps leads investments in software and enterprise technology, working across funds including TPG Capital, TPG Growth, and the impact-oriented sector of TPG, The Rise Fund.
Over the past five years, Pradhan has been involved in or helped lead deals that total roughly $3 billion in invested capital.
He was part of TPG's investments in the software unicorns Nintex and Catalis. Nintex represents Pradhan's interest in workflow automation, facilitating, for instance, automatic emails about benefits to new employees once they submit a signed offer letter.
Pradhan had to sell his peers on Catalis, which is used to process one out of every three online property-tax payments, according to TPG, and the unsexy niche of software for government efficiency. After much research and debate, TPG became a minority shareholder in Catalis last summer.
"The conventional notion was that there was no way to make money as an investor doing anything that has to do with the government," Pradhan said. "I'm proud to have changed people's thought processes and perspectives on a particular industry we ended up investing in."
The last book he read: "Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians" by Jane Hyun.
Alexander Lukas, 28, Barclays
As the head of SPX-options trading, Alexander Lukas helms one of the largest books in the Barclays sales-and-trading division. Operating within the bank's vaunted volatility-trading team — flow volatility in the US brought in $450 million in revenue last year at Barclays, Insider previously reported, and is a perennial breadwinner — Lukas at age 28 manages and executes multibillion-dollar notional trades more commonly handled by veterans with a decade of trading experience.
That Lukas exudes maturity beyond his years isn't a coincidence. Growing up on Canada's rural west coast, he was the eldest of three siblings to a single father, and the family got by on social-assistance programs. "I had to grow up faster," Lukas told Insider.
Lukas' father, unable to work, decided to give back by starting a charity that collects leftover donuts and pastries from Tim Hortons and other bakeries and drives them to schools, homeless shelters, and other places that provide for people in need — excursions Lukas regularly helped with until heading off to college.
Raised on modest means, meritocracy always appealed to Lukas, who threw himself into academics and excelled at math and sciences, earning a scholarship to a boarding school and then admission to MIT in 2011. Wall Street didn't immediately appeal to him, but he came to believe his quantitative chops could have an impact in trading, and he appreciated that success hinges on ability and black-and-white results.
"The P&L speaks for itself," he said.
He joined Barclays in 2015 on its volatility-trading desk — an area he found especially appealing given how the playbook and problems constantly evolve. He quickly made a mark by developing metrics and tools to better assess risk-and-trading decisions from a quantitative standpoint.
The team's ability to navigate risk — and in turn offer better pricing — on large trades is a key selling point to clients.
The last book he read: "The Three-Body Problem" by Liu Cixin
Allison Boxer, 29, Pimco
Allison Boxer is responsible for helping craft Pimco's macroeconomic outlook on issues like inflation and monetary policy. She leads discussions about the market outlook at Pimco's investment forums and represents the $1.8 trillion money manager as an economic expert to the press.
The Tufts University graduate knew she wanted to work in finance, but she still wasn't sure of what she wanted after her internships, including stints at Merrill Lynch and the financial-software company SS&C Technologies.
She started her career at Pimco, where she had also interned, as an analyst working with insurance clients. After a year, she got the opportunity to work as a research associate for Rich Clarida, the asset manager's longtime economist.
Boxer took the chance and worked side-by-side — literally — with Clarida, a former assistant secretary of the US Treasury until his departure from Pimco in 2018 to become the vice chair of the Federal Reserve. She considers Clarida her mentor and told Insider that the relationship changed her life.
"I didn't even realize when I was starting out that this sort of career path was even available to me," she said. "I feel like Rich taught me everything I know about being a Fed watcher, understanding fixed-income markets and all the way down to more academic-type economics as well."
Her job requires real-time economic analysis, but Boxer is always thinking about the long game.
"It's not just about what next week's inflation print is going to look like but where's inflation going over the next three to five years, and those sorts of things."
The last book she read: "When We Cease to Understand the World" by Benjamín Labatut
Amy Chen, 35, Moelis & Company
Amy Chen leads the healthtech practice at Moelis & Company, primarily advising on mergers and acquisitions for healthcare, software, and tech-enabled companies. She helped establish the firm's coverage in this sector early last year, but has been advising on M&A transactions in healthtech since 2018.
"It was an industry I started doing deals in and then it kind of snowballed," Chen, who studied pre-med in college, said in an interview. She said the traction she was getting in the market was her inspiration for building the team into a continuous source of business for the bank.
"I find it really interesting and also kind of rewarding to work with companies that are trying to improve people's health, improve the consumer experience, eliminate waste in the system, and bring drugs to market in a more efficient manner," she told Insider. "You can make a lot of money by also doing good for the world."
She's now the firm's only managing director focused on the healthtech space, but joins forces with colleagues who cover companies in other niches of the healthcare ecosystem, such as pharmaceuticals.
Healthtech experienced a surge of interest as a result of advances tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. At Moelis, Chen's team has closed eight deals in the past year and a half, the terms on most of which going undisclosed. One effort she helped steer in 2021 was advising the online health-insurance marketplace eHealth on its defense against the activist hedge funds Hudson Executive Capital and Starboard Value, as well as a $225 million investment from H.I.G. Capital.
Away from work, Chen said her hands are full juggling family life. "We have two young kids, so I spend most of my time trying to keep them alive," she said.
Asked which is tougher — keeping her kids alive or handling high-stakes deals for demanding clients — Chen said it's the balancing act that is actually the hardest. "It's definitely juggling both, because you can't really drop the 'keep the kids alive' portion."
The last podcast she listened to: "Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend" with Conan O'Brien
Angel Pu Shum, 33, Warburg Pincus
Angel Pu Shum admits she only jumped into private equity because she needed a job after her two-year analyst program at Goldman Sachs ended. But she stayed to be instrumental in providing investments to technology companies, especially those run by immigrants.
"I have a soft spot for it," Shum, who has four portfolio companies with CEOs that have immigrated to the US, said. "The American Dream is very personal. I know how difficult it is to get started in the States."
One of those four companies is Clearwater Analytics, a software company that went public in September 2021, on the 30th anniversary of when Sandeep Sahai, the company's CEO, and his wife immigrated from India, Shum said.
Shum immigrated to the US with her parents from Beijing at age seven. The family lived in multiple cities before settling down in Chicago. Shum picked English up faster than her parents, and by the time she turned 10, her family often tasked her with negotiating with bill collectors on their behalf.
"My mom and I — we joke about it all the time — she's like, 'It's because I told you to refute those AT&T bills and those Comcast bills that you're doing deals today. You should be grateful I made you call the customer-service reps when you were younger," Shum said.
Shum has helped Warburg invest in software companies like Beacon, a risk-analytics fintech, and Samsara, a cloud-platform provider that went public last December.
When she's not closing a deal or managing a portfolio company, she's out picking up a new hobby or skill, like cooking, improv, or art.
"I have goals to learn something every couple quarters. It's not regimented, but I find it really helpful to balance work with something different that uses a different part of my brain," Shum said. Most recently, she's delved into tennis.
The last podcast she listened to: The New York Times's "The Daily" or NPR's "How I Built This."
Bryan Hom, 33, Blackstone
Bryan Hom, an investor in Blackstone's $30 billion infrastructure business, has played a key role in executing on and growing several of the firm's infrastructure investments since he joined Blackstone in 2019.
Hom has worked on deals including Applegreen, an investment that valued the major gas-station operator at some $878 million when it was announced in 2020, and the US motorways business of the airport-concession giant HMSHost. Hom serves as the head of corporate development and M&A at Atlantic Power Transmission, or APT, a Blackstone portfolio company.
The senior associate has helped APT launch bids to develop a clean-power transmission solution in New Jersey and helped shape the strategy for Applegreen Electric, an electric-vehicle-charging-infrastructure business within Applegreen.
Even to a dealmaker like Hom, the nature of the business can be "too transactional." For him, "it's really about forming relationships and thinking about and understanding what the other side wants in a negotiation."
Earlier in his career, Hom worked at EIG Global Energy Partners, a private-equity firm, sourcing and executing investments across renewable-power and energy infrastructure.
Hom counts Wallace Henderson, an executive advisor to Blackstone's infrastructure group, as a mentor. Also formerly an executive at EIG, Henderson encouraged Hom to go to business school to take advantage of the network and perspective the program could give him.
Hom prioritizes mentorship opportunities. He is on the board of Bottom Line, a nonprofit organization focused on helping first-generation students from low-income backgrounds succeed in college. It's a mission that resonates with Hom; many of his and his wife's family members were the first to attend college in their family.
"It's hard to learn to use all the career resources, if there are even career resources there in the first place, to set yourself on the right trajectory and get ahead," Hom said. "I was lucky, because my parents did go to college."
The last podcast he listened to: Daily morning radio show "Sports Junkies"
Chao Xia, 30, Man Numeric
Chao Xia's path to the quant profession came from her early interest in math. Born in Shangrao, a southern Chinese city in Jiangxi province, to two schoolteachers, Xia developed a knack for numbers. She won medals in math competitions and attended a young-and-gifted program at the University of Science and Technology in China.
After earning a bachelor's in statistics in China, the quant professional moved to the US to advance her studies in applied mathematics at Brown University.
Despite enjoying her field of study, Xia found herself wanting to apply her learnings to financial models: "Financials, to me, is a bigger challenge. It's a more complex, dynamic system," she said.
Xia now builds models as a quant researcher and co-manages the intellectual-property alpha-strategies portfolio at Man Numeric, the $40 billion division of the publicly traded hedge fund Man Group.
The firm knows the 30-year-old for her reliability and structured approach to evaluating and following the progress of her team's research. Her findings help keep Man Numeric's investment committee supplied with fresh ideas to stay competitive and agile against market changes. Xia said her latest projects involve using machine learning to spot patterns in data.
When Xia's not working with Man's strategic alpha-research group, she's helping its equity team to increase the capacity for alpha modeling in China.
One of the things that Xia is most proud of is sharing her experiences with other up-and-coming quants through Man Group's mentorship program. She has set up training for research teams in other countries to promote cohesion among the firm.
"They have the same confusion and worry about their growth and their career. So that's why I'm more than happy to take this role," Xia said.
The last book she read: "Look Inside" a book series from children's book publisher Usborne (which she read to her two kids)
David Israel, 27, Credit Suisse
Credit Suisse is a powerhouse in trading non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities — the typically riskier packages of home loans banks and other private institutions issue that the US government does not back. At the heart of the Swiss bank's success is David Israel, a 27-year-old VP who many consider to be among the best on the Street, one headhunter told Insider.
Israel studied at Johns Hopkins, initially pursuing biomedical engineering and spending his free time competing in debate, winning numerous awards and honors along the way. After a summer internship convinced him a career in research wasn't the right fit, he added an econ major and set his sights on something more fast-paced and intensive. He settled on Wall Street trading, where his math and finance chops were indispensable, but his background in debate also provided a valuable skill set: thinking on the fly and cogently responding to new issues that pop up.
Israel started out at Credit Suisse in 2015 in securitized products, eventually homing in on residential-home loans and joining the non-agency RMBS desk in 2017. The technical aptitude for the notoriously complex RMBS products came easy to Israel — but that was only half the battle.
"What allowed me to get to where I am today is marrying technical skills with communication — being able to summarize the issues at hand to clients who may not be as in the weeds as I am," Israel told Insider.
Israel is quick to credit his team, which he said has been best-in-class since he joined five years ago.
"In market share and volumes in the products we trade, we've been the leader on the street," Israel said.
The last book he read: "Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution" by Elie Mystal
Erica Britton, 35, Morgan Stanley
Last year, Erica Britton decided that it was time to shake things up.
Britton, 35, was head of P&L and valuation control at Millennium Management, one of the world's largest hedge funds, when she took a chance on a much smaller and less-established platform.
She left Millennium for Riverview Omni, the multi-manager hedge-fund platform housed inside Morgan Stanley Investment Management. The fund pursues equity long-short, quantitative, and other strategies.
Now an executive director in charge of Riverview Omni's treasury, P&L, and finance functions, Britton is enjoying a more entrepreneurial role helping to build the fund manager from the ground up.
"For the early part of my career, I always played it safe," Britton said in an email response to Insider's questions. "Looking back, there were a few opportunities where taking a risk could have benefitted my career. So last year I made a decision to learn from these missed opportunities."
Riverview Omni's fund launched in July 2021 with Britton on board and roughly $375 million under management. It's now grown to over $675 million despite an uncertain market environment and a down year for hedge funds.
Britton has differentiated herself by eking out returns despite not being a portfolio manager. As the treasurer, she acts as a liaison between Wall Street prime-brokerage desks and her colleagues, structuring trades around stocks that investors are betting against, and optimizing cash balances and currency holdings to earn more yield.
During her five years at Millennium, the Villanova University grad was a founding member of the firm's LGBTQ network, and she has continued her advocacy work at Morgan Stanley.
The last book she read: "Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story" by Jewel
Jason Lightning, 29, Goldman Sachs Asset Management
When Jason Lightning entered the asset-management industry, he soon realized he'd found the perfect place to marry his business-school experience at Yale with his love for history, which he majored in as an undergraduate.
As he moved forward in his career, he was in search of "something that piqued my intellectual curiosity in the same way that being a history major did, but also incorporated the qualitative and quantitative concepts that I studied in business school, and granted me the opportunity to make decisions based on that analysis," Lightning told Insider.
In quick succession, his career at Goldman Sachs Asset Management has taken off. He started as a summer analyst in 2016 before becoming a fixed-income analyst and eventually being promoted to Goldman's vice-president rank at 28. As a credit analyst on the high-yield-and-bank-loan team, Lightning, now 29, currently covers some of GSAM's most important sectors, such as telecom, media, building products, and homebuilders.
Lightning's research contributes to the team that manages the Goldman Sachs High Yield Fund and Goldman Sachs High Yield Floating Rate Fund, which respectively had $1.5 billion and $4.4 billion in assets as of June 30.
He notes that covering media has been "extremely intriguing" given how it's changed with the proliferation of streaming services, like Netflix and HBO Max, and how that competes with cable.
"It's really interesting to look at how that ecosystem will evolve over time," he said.
During his free time, Lightning, a Harlem native, has found it equally important to serve as a mentor in his own community, as well as in the broader finance industry.
Lightning has volunteered at the Boys & Girls Club of Harlem, which is just eight blocks from where he grew up. He's also been involved in Goldman's HBCU Possibilities Program, which aims to prepare undergraduates at historically Black colleges and universities for careers in financial services.
The last book he read: "The Nineties" by Chuck Klosterman
Jay Jacobs, 32, BlackRock
Jay Jacobs has spent his whole career working in the world of exchange-traded funds, and this spring he joined the biggest player in the industry.
BlackRock hired Jacobs in April as its US head of thematics and active equity ETFs, a newly created role aimed at bolstering BlackRock's menu of funds around specific themes like clean energy and cybersecurity.
He is responsible for $15 billion worth of ETFs within its lineup of Megatrends funds and $200 billion of international ETF assets under management. He oversees all aspects of the products' life cycle, from which themes to seize on, how to package and market them, and how to balance elements like ETFs' liquidity and exposure. BlackRock is the largest ETF provider with $2.8 trillion of ETF assets as of June.
"Being able to take these nuanced ideas around investing in disruptive technology or investing in foreign countries and bringing that to anyone, not just the institutions that could do that in the past, but mom and pop who want to diversify their portfolios or get exposure to new growth ideas — I just think it feels very rewarding," he told Insider.
Jacobs started his career as an analyst working with ETF providers at the New York Stock Exchange. Global X, then a small asset manager and one of his clients, hired Jacobs as an analyst in 2013. He left as the head of research and strategy — the team he founded there — and helped build the firm to oversee more than $40 billion of assets.
Through his career he found a mentor in Laura Morrison, who is now the chief revenue officer of the ETF provider Direxion and who previously ran the ETF business of the New York Stock Exchange. And Jacobs said Bruno del Ama, a cofounder of Global X, imparted "that entrepreneurial attitude" that he values.
The last book he read: "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer
Julia Dworkin, 30, Jefferies
Julia Dworkin is quickly becoming a top player in the capital-introductions space on Wall Street.
Dworkin has helped Jefferies triple its prime-brokerage business since she started in 2016. She manages eight people in the US alongside Victor Bang, and has helped build out technology for the cap-intro and sales teams. She has covered the Midwest for most of her career and has also taken over Texas.
A key part of her role is to connect massive institutions and wealthy clients with promising hedge funds. To stand out in that space, the Wharton grad said it's important to become an expert on the clients, including knowing their history.
"I think it's also having intellectual curiosity," she said. "I don't like not knowing the answer to a question and you have to anticipate someone else's needs four steps in advance."
It also helps to be timely and a good advisor to clients, she said. For example, helping a hedge fund structure its marketing strategy or helping institutional investors with their manager due diligence and manager discovery.
"That's not really in the job description, but it makes you more of a commodity that folks want to talk to," she said. "The ultimate goal of cap intro is to be an information broker who can synthesize information from investors, and you synthesize it and optimize it for hedge funds."
Dworkin has excelled at all of these factors. "Julia has incredible technical knowledge," Leor Shapiro, the global head of capital intelligence at Jefferies, said. "She is very advanced quantitatively and technically in explaining to a manager how their numbers and attribution looks and in how to position their product offering in the market."
The last book she read: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker
Julia Pei, 32, Fidelity Investments
Julia Pei started dabbling in trading as an economics major at the University of Chicago.
"I really liked the puzzle element of putting together an investment idea and gathering knowledge to ultimately figure out whether or not to buy a stock," Pei told Insider.
The Atlanta native joked that she "learned a lot of lessons" as an amateur trader, but she's improved since. After working at Credit Suisse's investment bank and the real-estate billionaire Sam Zell's family office, Pei got her MBA from Wharton and joined Fidelity in 2018. As a healthcare analyst covering medical-equipment stocks, her portfolio returned 80.28% and outperformed the benchmark by 21.8%, according to the brokerage firm.
During the pandemic, she covered manufacturers of diagnostic tests, which was stressful but educational.
"It was a really interesting experience to help the firm understand the arc of the pandemic, how quickly we were going to be able to get these diagnostic tests, and how reliable or unreliable they were," she said. "I learned just a tremendous amount about healthcare, about investing, and about the immune system."
She was promoted in August 2021 to manage Fidelity's environment-and-alternative-energy fund. Pei, who started her career in Credit Suisse's power-and-renewables group, hadn't planned on returning to the sector, but environmentalism is close to her heart. Now based in Boston, she spends many weekends hiking in New Hampshire and has a balcony garden with dahlias, tomatoes, and blueberries.
"Being out in nature really makes me think about the implications of climate change and the impact you see on the environment," she said.
The last podcast she listened to: "Invest Like the Best" with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Juli Bowe, 34, Wells Fargo
In the three years since Juli Bowe joined Wells Fargo, she has made her mark by boosting Wells' trading franchise within one of Wall Street's most complex and quickly growing asset classes: structured products.
A trader on Wells Fargo's commercial mortgage-backed securities, or CMBS, desk, Bowe has led the bank to lead rankings in single-asset, single-borrower deals — typically based on one real-estate property — as well as conduit transactions — which work more like high-yield credit.
Bowe began her career on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs, and she credits her big break to the departure of a mentor in 2012. Bowe was just two years into her career, but she raised her hand to take on the senior trader's book of business, at the time worth roughly $1 billion.
The opportunity to run a large book at a young age and surpass expectations "furthered my ambition to continue in this market and learn more and become a better trader," Bowe told Insider.
Bowe also credits the half-decade she spent on the buyside, at David Tepper's Appaloosa Management, for broadening her experience. Bowe said that she was the first female trader Appaloosa had ever hired, and that she expanded her remit to trade other asset classes, ranging from corporate credit and interest rates to equities.
After joining Wells Fargo in 2019, Bowe set herself apart with high-conviction trades, like a bet that hotel properties would rebound as pandemic-related shutdowns wane. "It just comes down to having an opinion and not being afraid to voice it," she said. The trust she's built with counterparties across Wall Street has also been foundational to her success. Many asset classes now trade electronically and can feel impersonal, but CMBS trading is complex enough that having solid trading relationships can go a long way.
"Having those deep relationships and having people you trust is something that I really enjoy," Bowe said.
The last podcast she listened to: Fantasy Football podcasts "Fantasy Footballers" and "FantasyPros"
Kathleen Lawler, 35, KKR
Kathleen Lawler has developed a wealth of knowledge in the power-and-utilities sector. And it's paid off in spades in her role as a director within KKR's infrastructure team.
Lawler honed her energy expertise at two investment firms in the 2010s and then landed at JPMorgan, where she was responsible for originating, structuring, and monitoring investments in utilities, power, and transportation.
By the time she reached KKR in 2021, she was ready for a broader leadership role.
The firm's infrastructure business oversees $49 billion in assets globally and Lawler has kept busy putting that money to work, leading the $1.9 billion carveout of Clearway Energy's district-heating business late last year. The deal brought one of North America's top owners of district-energy systems — low-carbon facilities that can heat and cool many buildings — into the KKR fold.
"We're facing a complete rebuild of energy infrastructure to accommodate the energy transition," Lawler, who noted she was recently in Los Angeles and was struck by how much work needed to be done to support renewable electricity in the area, said.
"It's just a massive investment," Lawler said of the impending infrastructure work needed to transition the energy grid to renewables.
"Everyone is grappling with how consumers are going to pay for it and how businesses are going to pay for it."
Lawler graduated from Yale University and, when she isn't focused on KKR's investments, she mentors and advocates for female executives, both within KKR, its portfolio companies, and in the power-and-utility industries more broadly.
A former player for the Yale University Rugby Football Club, Lawler still supports the team by serving on the board of Friends of Yale Rugby in her spare time.
Kelsey Berro, 29, JPMorgan Asset Management
As a portfolio manager at JPMorgan, Kelsey Berro helps run $15 billion as part of the firm's Unconstrained Fixed Income strategies. She has risen from analyst to vice president in her seven years at the bank's money manager.
But her plan wasn't to land on Wall Street at all.
Berro worked in theaters growing up and, after high school, enrolled in the performing-arts college Boston Conservatory at Berklee. The narrow focus on musical training became overwhelming, and she wanted to make a change.
Berro transferred to Pace University in Manhattan to study economics. Early on, a professor encouraged her to join the college's monetary-policy club after she aced an economics test.
That's when her passion for the Federal Reserve, finance, and economics — topics she enjoyed batting around with her father, an investor, while she was growing up — started flourishing.
"I'm a bit relentless when it comes to learning things, understanding things, and being a subject-matter expert," she told Insider. Her years at Pace intensely studying the financial system's inner workings gave her a leg up when she started out in finance full time in 2015.
Berro is now on the team that manages the firm's Unconstrained Fixed Income strategies, including the $3.2 billion Global Bond Opportunities Fund and the $990 million Unconstrained Debt Fund. She helps shape decision-making at the firm more broadly as secretary of JPMorgan's asset-management-investment committee.
At the start of 2022, Berro co-wrote a report where she predicted the European Central Bank would hike interest rates this year; it was an out-of-consensus call at the time but has proved prescient.
"It's motivating every day to follow the market, follow the data, try to understand where it's going, and help my team ultimately come up with investment decisions that are going to drive alpha," Berro said. "It doesn't have to be the biggest call or the most show-stopping call. It's looking at the data every single day — being the one that's in the weeds."
The last book she read: "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Naveen Shahani, 32, Apollo Global Management
Naveen Shahani has spent the past eight-and-a-half years at Apollo Global Management and is currently a principal, working within the firm's private-equity division to scout out and execute investments ranging from distressed opportunities to straightforward buyouts.
Shahani, who helped found and spearhead Apollo's special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, business that raised two inaugural SPACs in 2021, had a key role in the distressed-for-control investment of the airport-baggage handler Swissport, which came about during the COVID pandemic.
The investor has racked up an expansive range of deal experience, having helped facilitate four buyouts, three restructurings, and two exits. Notably, Shahani worked on the buyout of the restaurant chain Qdoba, the exit of Sprouts Farmers Market, and the restructuring of the family-entertainment center Chuck E. Cheese.
Shahani, a native of Long Island and the son of two entrepreneurs, said he was drawn to private equity in part through the inspiration of seeing his father run multiple businesses, starting with a retail store in Manhattan in the 1980s.
"My father had a number of ventures, from the time I was a kid, to the time I went to college," Shahani said. "In each of those ventures, I saw him facing adversity, facing different business challenges, and that just really resonated with me."
The Wharton graduate said he likes to reposition Apollo's investments for growth — a process that comes through teamwork. Apollo staffs its investment with teams of three: one partner, one principal and one associate. He pointed to the home-security firm ADT as one Apollo portfolio company that recently received a $1.2 billion investment from State Farm.
Prior to working at Apollo, he worked in the financial-sponsors group of Credit Suisse and helped finance Apollo's acquisition of Hostess. It was through Shahani's work at Credit Suisse that he became familiar with Apollo and its professionals.
The last podcast he listened to: NPR's "How I Built This" with Guy Raz
Noah Zerance, 33, Bank of America
Noah Zerance didn't follow the traditional path to finance, but he credits his success to the time he served as an airborne infantryman right out of high school.
"It really gave me an advantage, at least from a problem-solving perspective, on how to accelerate and how to move quickly in the business world," Zerance, a vice president with Bank of America's global sustainable-finance group, said.
Zerance said he faced challenges breaking into Wall Street and wasn't aware of the pipelines for vets to join large banking firms. But after leaving the military and graduating college, he joined JPMorgan in 2014 in Delaware. After a year and a half, Zerance used the network he'd built at JPMorgan to transfer to New York before ultimately making the jump to Bank of America in 2017. There Zerance supported the bank's commodities desk — setting up the pipes for complex trades to transform from ideas into completed transactions. Three years later he found a spot on Bank of America's Sustainable Asset Finance team.
At Bank of America, Zerance has helped spearhead a range of green-energy investments, from sustainable construction projects and wind farms to electric vehicles, or EVs. He spent his initial time on the team leaning on his accounting bonafides to lead a tax-equity transaction involving fuel-cell technology.
In 2021, Zerance worked with Bank of America's consumer division to craft auto-leasing products for EVs. Over time, he has become one of the global sustainable-finance group's experts on EVs.
"I'm pretty confident I work on the coolest team at the bank," Zerance said. "It's like a dream come true for a kid that was obsessed with cars, getting an opportunity to work in an industry that is having a once-in-a-century revolution."
The last book he read: "The Way of Kings" by Brandon Sanderson
Oliver Townsend, 34, Millennium Management
Oliver Townsend isn't one to list his own career accomplishments.
"As we always say in cycling, I 'just let the legs do the talking,'" he said.
A senior portfolio manager at the $57 billion multi-strategy fund Millennium manages a macro and relative-value interest-rate strategy focused on developed markets. He attributes much of his success to working with "the brightest and hardest working people," like one mentor who would leave no stone unturned when looking for a winning investment idea.
Townsend said he learned from the mentor that "even if you don't find anything, the planning is indispensable and keeps you agile and educated for whenever something changes."
Townsend, whose education focused on engineering, started his career at Goldman Sachs as a software engineer on its electronic bond-trading platform.
He then joined Morgan Stanley as a trader on the US interest-rate-swap desk, where he ultimately ran the US short-end-rates business. In 2013, Townsend made the jump to the buy side as a trader at Citadel. He left as a senior portfolio manager and a limited partner to join Millennium in 2019.
The financial industry satisfies his appreciation for math and modeling techniques "while at the same time working in a competitive and iterative environment," he said.
Every year, Townsend competes on either the running, cycling, or triathlon circuit, which helps him clear his head and sharpen his focus. In 2021, he was a runner-up in the Old Man Winter Duathlon and won first place in the New York City Duathlon in 2017.
"I find that it's good to offer oneself multiple opportunities and outlets for success," he said. "So, if I were, let's say, struggling at work, I can still win on the bike, or vice versa. It's important for one's confidence and well-being to always feel like you're doing a good job somewhere."
The last book he read: "Origins of Political Order" by Francis Fukuyama
Richesh Shah, 33, PJT Partners
Richesh Shah isn't your average investment banker. As a director at PJT Partners, he doesn't preach the value of toiling late into the night unnecessarily, and he eschews the harsh bedside manners that society stereotypically associates with whip-cracking Wall Street bosses.
"There's no, 'Hey, I'm a director. I'm more senior. I have analysts, associates, VPs that do the work.' For me, we're all on the same team," Shah told Insider, describing his vibe around the office.
At PJT, Shah is part of the boutique bank's structured-products team, which develops bespoke financing and capital solutions for big investors. They've worked on a variety of projects for clients such as Blackstone, Yum! Brands, and Madison Square Garden. Previously, Shah was an investment-banking analyst covering financial institutions and media-and-telecoms companies at Citi. He was part of the original team that spun out of Blackstone's M&A group in 2015, forming PJT Partners.
Now, he sees himself as a mentor for junior bankers coming up the ranks. Shah learned the hard way that putting his hand up for every task can put bankers on the fast track to burnout, he said. He advises junior bankers to be emboldened to set more practical boundaries to prevent work from overtaking their personal lives.
In August, when most senior Wall Streeters had deserted New York for the summer holidays, Shah was in the bank's headquarters in Manhattan, and recalled thinking his office had become "a revolving door" of juniors coming in, one after the other, seeking advice on topics like how to advance their careers or whether they should participate in private-equity recruiting.
"There's days when I'm running a model, and there's days when I'm asking junior folks to lead a call with board members because I feel confident they can do that," he said.
The last book he read: "Building A Second Brain" by Tiago Forte
Samuel Haber, 33, Bridgewater Associates
Samuel Haber got a taste of the finance industry in high school working a summer job clerking in the crude-oil-trading pit at the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Haber grew up in Long Island around the corner from a man who worked for the exchange and continued picking up work through his college breaks. Haber became fascinated with how political events dictated oil prices and the energy markets in general.
After graduating from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania with an undergraduate degree in finance and statistics and a minor in East Asian languages and culture, he started his career at Barclays Capital. He spent two years as an analyst on the bank's US Rates trading desk overseeing the desk's automated pricing-and-hedging system.
He joined Bridgewater in 2013 as a trading associate and was promoted in 2021 to head of portfolio research. He is responsible for the evolution of the firm's portfolio-construction process and evaluating and managing investment risks across Bridgewater's portfolios.
Over the past three years, Haber has also helped run Bridgewater's investment-associate class, a multi-year curriculum to help people without prior investing experience become developed investors.
When he's not working, Haber and his wife, who also works at Bridgewater, are big poker players — a skill they both learned from previous coworkers. Haber played in the World Series of Poker main event in 2021, where he came in 349th place out of more than 6,000 players.
Haber uses similar problem-solving skills when he's investing to play poker. It's about "dealing with imperfect information and thinking about how to calibrate the size of your bets and how to spread your bets over time given that uncertainty," he said.
The last book he read: 'This is How They Tell Me the World Ends' by Nicole Perlroth
Swati Rao, 34, Citi
Swati Rao is a director within the banking, capital markets, and advisory division at Citi, focusing on deals mainly for companies handling transportation, logistics, and the supply chain.
An onslaught of negative headlines about supply-chain snarls and cargo headaches has beset the industry. Founders in the space, Rao said, have risen to the occasion admirably, praising them for investing "blood, sweat, and tears into building cutting-edge technology companies and marketplaces very quickly."
"Technology is driving significant change in every part of the supply chain, and it is an exciting time to be a thought leader in a sector where players like Uber Freight, Flexport, e-commerce and warehouse-fulfillment providers continue to scale and disrupt the market," Rao said.
In just the past year, Rao has been involved in trades and transactions worth more than $8 billion in total value, spanning tech, logistics, and transportation. Deals Rao has advised on include the $640 million sale of the industrials company Transtar Industries to Fortress Transportation and Infrastructure Investors last year, as well as the combination of Worldwide Express and GlobalTranz Enterprises in 2021.
Rao, who relocated from India to the US about a decade ago, studied engineering but came to finance via an internship at Citi in 2012. She's gone on to work with clients including FedEx, UPS, Google, and other big names throughout her career in banking. She predicted that the need to speed up the movement of goods throughout supply chains is going to keep bankers like her busy advising on mergers and combinations.
"Consolidation will remain a theme in this highly fragmented industry while shippers and carriers continue to accelerate the pace of technology adoption to create end-to-end nimble and efficient supply chains," she said.
The last podcast she listen to: The BBC's "Global News Podcast"
Tinofara Majoni, 32, Trian Fund Management
Wall Street knows the billionaire activist investor Nelson Peltz as the face of Trian, the $7.6 billion fund that has taken stakes in names like Wendy's, Invesco, and Unilever, and agitates for change.
Who the public does not know as well is the elite team behind him, which includes people like Tinofara Majoni, who goes by Tino, a 32-year-old analyst on the investment team.
Majoni is focused on holdings across consumer, industrials, and non-bank asset-management firms like Invesco and Janus Henderson. He takes on virtually all aspects of the investment process, from generating new investment ideas and attending investment-committee meetings to doing due diligence.
Majoni has forged a path in high finance he may not have found if he hadn't left Zimbabwe, where he was born and raised.
As Majoni finished high school, devastating hyperinflation and economic instability there led him to seek higher education out of the country. He was admitted into a US Embassy-backed program that allowed him to apply to Colgate University in upstate New York. He earned a full scholarship to attend and studied mathematical economics and computer science there.
"I have always desired a high-impact career that challenges me, and where I get to work on complex issues. Active-shareholder engagement embodies that," Majoni, who joined Trian as a part-time analyst in 2019 and became full time last year, told Insider.
Before joining Trian, Majoni worked at Prudential Financial, first as an analyst in the pension-buyout business and then as a senior analyst in the mergers-and-acquisitions group. In his first role, he was part of the small team that carried out pension buyouts at Motorola Solutions, JCPenney, and the industrial-parts manufacturer Timken.
Peltz likes to remind employees that "they don't teach persistence in business school," a belief Majoni says he tries to live by.
The last book he read: "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" by Carol S. Dweck.
Vahe Musoyan, 33, Citadel Securities
Vahe Musoyan has spent the past decade building and growing the systematic-trading capabilities at the industry juggernaut Citadel Securities, where he's now a lead quantitative researcher. He's among the most influential young quants on Wall Street, according to conversations with several industry experts.
"Vahe is definitely a badass," one senior quant recruiter familiar with his work said.
Musoyan, the son of two engineers, grew up in Armenia. He started coding by age 11, creating a flash-card computer tool in middle school to help memorize English vocabulary words. He started university in Armenia and transferred to Stanford, where he graduated in 2010 with a degree in computer science. After ruling out academic research — he preferred "faster feedback loops" — he noticed many people with similar backgrounds were flocking to high-frequency trading. He joined up with Getco, which at the time was among the largest-market makers in US equities.
A couple years later, Citadel approached him, and in the interview process, he became taken with the company's scientific approach to markets.
"I got the impression the people in charge of the business were approaching the markets like a physicist approaches the natural world: formulate hypotheses and learn fundamental truths about the market," Musoyan said.
He joined in 2013 and got to work building fully automated market-making systems — testing hypotheses about the market and harvesting the novel insights that hold predictive-trading power. He and a colleague spearheaded a trading effort that quickly gained traction, and they eventually scaled it up globally across multiple asset classes, Musoyan said, declining to specify in which markets it traded.
"Being able to bootstrap an effort that eventually became one of the largest in its space was a big point of personal pride," Musoyan said.
The last book he read: "River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life" by Richard Dawkins
Go-to takeout order: Sushi and beef bibimbap from Sushi-San in Chicago
Vinay Trivedi, 31, General Atlantic
During his time at Harvard studying computer science, Vinay Trivedi spent most of his free time building apps and "pretending I was the next Mark Zuckerberg," as he put it.
One of his apps allowed students to map their plans and location for the summer so they could connect with other interning students.
This passion for technology is what ultimately led him to the investment industry. He's now a vice president at General Atlantic focusing on the sector.
While at Harvard, Trivedi started moonlighting at a Boston-based venture-capital firm, Romulus Capital.
What lured him into the field was, "a combination of me building things on my own, and then actually being able to see entrepreneurs take their products to market," he said. "I obviously fell in love with investing."
Since joining General Atlantic in 2019, Trivedi has been involved in several deals totaling $3.3 billion in invested capital. One of those investments last year even marked General Atlantic's first in space exploration. The $1.4 billion Series A investment in Sierra Space, which General Atlantic, Coatue, and Moore Strategic Ventures led, was the second-largest private-capital raise to occur in the aerospace-and-defense sector globally.
Trivedi, who previously worked at Blackstone and SoftBank, was also involved in General Atlantic's deal-making with the biometric-security firm Clear Secure, from its initial 2019 investment to Clear's June 2021 IPO.
Trivedi is on the advisory council for the think tank Center for Democracy and Technology, and noted that his interest in innovative technologies also extends to the impact they have on society, "whether that's diversity issues, AI and job loss, or privacy," Trivedi said.
"While I'm out there investing in the most cutting-edge technologies, I do find causes to be involved with to think through those issues and see how the industry can address those as well," he said.
The last book he read: "The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer" by Christopher Clarey
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