Svetlana Lee, 37, arrived in the U.S. in 1992 from her native Bulgaria to attend college on a scholarship with $600 to her name. Faisal Syed, also 37, an alumnus of the prestigious Lawrence School, India’s oldest boarding school, moved to the U.S. in 1996 to get his MBA. Erez Kalir, 39, who has a JD from Yale Law School, worked in Washington as a staffer with the Senate Judiciary Committee and in the office of former vice president Al Gore before becoming a consultant at McKinsey & Co. Clayton DeGiacinto, 38, is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a former Army airborne ranger.
Despite their disparate backgrounds, Lee, Syed, Kalir and DeGiacinto have at least two things in common: They all run their own hedge fund firms today, and they are all members of Institutional Investor’s 2011 Hedge Fund Rising Stars, our annual list of the hedge fund world’s up-and-coming talent. This year’s 30 Rising Stars were chosen not just for their professional expertise and reputations, but also for their willingness to think and do things differently. They represent the range and diversity that hedge funds embrace and from which their success is derived.
| Click on the names below to read the profiles of the 30 talented investment professionals featured in our list of the 2011 Hedge Fund Rising Stars. | |
| Name | Firm |
| Eric Alt | Hall Capital Partners |
| Jennifer Croswell | SAC Capital Advisors |
| Clayton DeGiacinto | Axonic Capital |
| Benjamin Durrant | ICG Advisors |
| Jennifer Fan | Arrowhawk Capital Partners |
| Joshua Fink | Enso Capital Management |
| Pierre-Henri Flamand | Edoma Capital Partners |
| Gareth Henry | Fortress Investment Group |
| Erez Kalir | Sabretooth Capital Management |
| Katie Kalvoda | Newport Wealth Management |
| Edward Keller | Morgan Stanley |
| Andrew Laurino | Credit Suisse |
| Svetlana Lee | Varna Capital |
| Gary Lehrman | Lombard Odier Investment Managers |
| Greth Lester | Perella Weinberg Partners |
| Greg Lippmann | LibreMax Capital |
| J. Jason Mitchell | GLG Partners |
| Gaurav Patankar | Lockheed Martin Investment Management Co. |
| Craig Perry | Sabretooth Capital Management |
| Scott Pittman | Mount Sinai Medical Center |
| Gregory Racz | Hutchin Hill Capital |
| Angela Samfilippo | Pine River Capital Management |
| Jill Schurtz | Robeco-Sage Capital Management |
| Jonathan Shafter | Boston Provident |
| Steven Simmons | Maxim Group |
| Scott Sinclair | Cascabel Management |
| Faisal Syed | Pamli Capital Management |
| Morgan Sze | Azentus Capital Management |
| Oliver Wiener | BTIG |
| Patrick Wolff | Grandmaster Capital Management |
Many of the 2011 Rising Stars are outsiders. Even some apparent industry insiders chose paths less taken. Oliver Wiener could have opted for a career with a major investment bank (he had worked as a summer intern at Goldman Sachs Group during college), but instead he has built a phenomenal trading business at the boutique firm BTIG. Scott Sinclair, a former Tiger Management Corp. analyst, spent eight years touring with his rock band before co-founding Cascabel Management. It is hard to be better connected than Joshua Fink, the son of BlackRock co-founder Laurence Fink; he made the bold decision to launch his own fund when he was just 23.
Oddly enough, it is the two most obvious insiders who have the most to prove. Former Goldman proprietary traders Pierre-Henri Flamand and Morgan Sze both left that firm in the past year to start their own hedge funds. Flamand and Sze were recognized as the top of their class at Goldman, but its traders have a mixed record when it comes to plying their skills on their own, and last year’s passage of the Volcker rule, which restricts banks’ ability to trade their own capital, is throwing plenty of former prop traders into the mix.
